Background

Henri Marie-Joseph Sonier de Lubac was born in February 1896 at Cambrai in northern France at a time of growing conflict between Church and State.Footnote ¹ In 1899 a ‘laicist’ Republican government, under Pierre Waldeck-Rousseau, launched a campaign against the regular clergy in the belief that an effective attack on clerical influence was a necessity for a modern State.Footnote ² (The royalism Religious inculcated in their charges was probably the more pressing concern.) The teaching Congregations wielded most influence, and it was they who would bear the brunt of the attack, which began with the legal declaration of their subordination to State supervision in 1901, and came to its climax under the succeeding government of Emile Combes when in the course of 1903–4 some ten thousand schools run by Religious were closed. Late in 1904, Combes introduced a bill providing for the rigorous separation of Church and State. Echoes of Combesian polemic would reverberate thirty years later in the introduction to de Lubac's Catholicisme.Footnote ³ After a fierce debate, the bill became law the following year.Footnote ⁴ The Church's buildings and other properties were confiscated though provision was made for the (gratuitous) ‘lease-back’ of churches, seminaries, and presbyteries by elected lay committees. The separation was denounced in no uncertain terms by Pius X in his encyclical Vehementer nos of February 1906, and in a document from some few months later, Gravissimo officii, the Pope rejected the lay committees notion as incompatible with the hierarchical ordering of the Church. The expulsion of some twenty thousand Religious was not taken pacifically in certain places. There was violence at Nantes, for example, and Lyons. De Lubac's father, a banker, received a criminal sentence for striking a counter-demonstrator during the seizure of the Capuchin Franciscan house at Lyons – which was why it was thought desirable for the family to move out of the area to the far north.Footnote ⁵

French Catholics had perforce to seek some form of peaceful co-existence for the future. If in many parishes it was, except in a monetary sense, ‘business as usual’– rather than expelling priests by the use of force, the government often preferred to leave them in place as ‘occupiers without legal title’,Footnote ⁶ the overall position was undoubtedly uncomfortable. The Church had lost the financial wherewithal for educating her clergy, at any rate in the numbers hitherto customary. Catholicism had also lost the cachet which earlier invested it as the official religion of France. The nascent class of ideologically secular school-teachers was unremittingly and influentially hostile. On the other hand, a new liberty of action reigned. ‘With the maire and the prefect powerless to object, Catholic organizations had a free rein.’Footnote ⁷ This was just as well, since the Church had now to improvise new ways of obtaining a presence to French society, especially in matters of religious education and social action. At the Instituts catholiques in Paris, Lyons, and Toulouse, and in such emerging journals as Le Bulletin de la semaine and La Quinzaine, the need of the hour was perceived to be an aggiornamento of Christian doctrine in the light of new knowledge, so as to prevent the incarceration of Catholicism in a sectarian ghetto. In this context, the efforts of doctrinal Modernists, concerned to secure for Catholic scholarship (notably, exegetical) an autonomy vis-à-vis the magisterium, and, less damagingly, of ‘social Modernists’, seeking an autonomy for the Catholic laity qua citizens vis-à-vis the episcopate, were by no means always helpful. They triggered the formation of a climate of anxiety on soil well-prepared by the perceptible advances of State-approved religious indifferentism. Would accommodation to the contemporary lead to loss of substance for the faith? These fears must be taken into account in order to understand the response of ecclesiastical officialdom, both at the time of Modernism and in the crisis over the ‘new theology’ of the late 1940s and 50s.Footnote ⁸

The Influence of Blondel

It is here we must situate seeming over-reactions to a paradigmatic figure who greatly influenced the young de Lubac: Maurice Blondel. The Blondelian source of much in de Lubac's outlook has been so fully demonstrated that some account of him seems unavoidable at this point.Footnote ⁹ In his 1893 L’Action and the succeeding 1896 ‘Letter on Apologetics’, Blondel's aim was not so much to ‘modernise’ Catholic doctrine as to evangelise secular humanism on behalf of the Church.Footnote ¹⁰ Analyzing the factors involved in action, a series of entailments which the philosopher qua philosopher could recognize led inexorably, Blondel argued, to raising the issue of the Christian claim.Footnote ¹¹ He rejected the apologetics in possession, which took positive data and sought to reconcile them with Neo-Scholastic theses, on the ground of the lack of homogeneity between physical hypotheses and metaphysical explanations. And in any event, as was generally agreed, faith cannot simply be the result of logical demonstration. So how might one construct a philosophical apologetics that would really be an apologetics and yet truly remain philosophical? In effect, Blondel re-formulated that question in terms that suggested the germ of a reply. How does the supernatural come to impose itself as an inescapable need from which we cannot prescind? Concern for the unity (but also distinction) of natural and supernatural is one of the many forms which unitive thinking will take in de Lubac's career. I shall return to this in my concluding ‘proposal’.

To Blondel's mind, merely to say that reason provides proofs for God's existence and Scholasticism a rational exposition of Christian doctrine did not suffice. For what of those who do not accept the presuppositions which underlie the use of reason in question, or reject the principles at work in the Scholastic manner of thought? There come to mind, for instance, those influenced by the putative founder of modern philosophy, Immanuel Kant, and his countless epigones. And if, as was sometimes insinuated by Scholastic spokesmen, the natural and supernatural exist on two levels that are not only distinct but separate, no genuinely philosophical apologetics for supernatural religion can in any case be achieved. Contemporary secular opinion, Blondel wryly noted, is only too happy with the prevalence of this mind-set in the Church. That opinion wants to acknowledge no heterogeneity within the human act, nothing immanent to spiritual action in knowing and willing that is not simply human. At the same time it rejects every form of the idea of transcendence, and notably the notion of divine intervention in the world's affairs. In this context, Blondel's attempt to show that an opening to Christianity is immanent within modern philosophy and crowns the hitherto concealed aspirations of the natural order was daring indeed. It could expect critics from without – and from within.

In his master-work L’Action, analysis of the self and its conditions of being – notably, how the will becomes aware of itself and its own inescapable demands – disengages step-by-step the idea of the supernatural.Footnote ¹² All action implies in some way a self-opening to the universal. It entails an implicit metaphysics. Specifically, it involves the apprehension of an ideal order imposing an absolute duty. In Blondelian idiom, action exhibits the mystery of the impotence that the infinite aspiration of the heart contains. Blondel drew two conclusions: first, the natural order cannot be self-sufficient, and secondly, non-advertence to the need for something more is out of the question. Of itself, the will possesses neither its own principles nor its own end, and yet its own reality calls out for the Absolute. We are forced to want to become what we cannot expect of ourselves, and so the supernatural is in different senses both absolutely impossible and unconditionally necessary.

While this may be called as much or more a practical (or impractical!) conclusion as an intellectual one, the idea of God is nonetheless its inevitable completion. This is a ‘supernatural’ whose formal notion is drawn de facto from historic Christianity though it is not taken de iure from there. Blondel has made no appeal to faith. Such an appeal would appear inevitably to fail in the forum of philosophy as such. Nor has he shown any desire to turn Christianity into a philosophical gnosis that would deny revelation its rights. If there is divine revelation it will, by definition, occur independently of human initiative and, doubtless, be able freely to furnish its own rationale. Still, as philosophers we cannot exclude the possibility that the quest for the Absolute may uncover something analogous to what Christian revelation proposes. In that case, it is surely legitimate to confront revelation with the needs of our will to discern in what degree it can fill the bill.

In the ‘Letter on Apologetics’,Footnote ¹³ writing explicitly for believers, Blondel repeats that, by itself, philosophy can neither negate nor affirm the reality of the supernatural.Footnote ¹⁴ It can only maintain the supernatural's theoretical necessity and natural inaccessibility. Although theological doctrines have a quite different bearing from philosophical, for the two gnoseological levels differ utterly, there is also, nonetheless, a strict connexion between them. Between the philosophical and the religious problem a continuity holds good: concern with the outcome of human agency is common. So Blondel denounces both the confusion of domains and their false separation. The theologian must make the revealed truth shine out in its fullness, and leave the rest to others (including philosophers) who have their own competence, some of which may be useful to the faith. Taken in the abstract, a variety of cognitive vehicles could, no doubt, be serviceable. But in the concrete circumstances in which the Church finds herself, Blondel concludes to the need for a truly ‘integral’ philosophy (such as his own) if Catholicism is not to be excluded from the world of modern thought.Footnote ¹⁵ Imprudent separation of what should be taken unitively together, a cardinal vice in the Blondelian universe, will be anathema to de Lubac as well.

In their concern to re-unite the increasingly separated worlds of lay culture and Church, Blondel's disciples sought to overcome an excessive intellectualism in the Scholastic method as it had developed.Footnote ¹⁶ This too would be included in de Lubac's programme. Negative responses from the School led Blondel to attempt an integration of his approach with some characteristic findings of the Scholastic treatise De fide. More especially, he sought to link the presence in us of the idea of the supernatural, and the initial orientation of awareness that prepares the gift of faith and welcomes it once received, to the classic propositions of that treatise about the pius credibilitatis affectus and the necessity of prevenient grace. Here Blondel found, as he thought, a predecessor in the work of the Redemptorist Victor-Auguste Dechamps, archbishop of Malines and one of the architects of the First Vatican Council's Dogmatic Constitution on faith. De Lubac's confrère and erstwhile pupil Xavier Tilliette would deem it ‘impossible to overestimate’ the impact of Blondel's method against the background of Dechamps’ apologetics, emphasising as these did the union in faith of the ‘interior fact’ of the state of the heart with the ‘exterior fact’ of the promulgation of the Gospel, in the early formation of de Lubac's mind.Footnote ¹⁷ Writing in Annales under the pseudonym ‘F. Mallet’,Footnote ¹⁸ Blondel had made some headway in pointing up connexions when the blow fell which closed Annales de philosophie chrétienne, the journal of which he was proprietor, and imposed ecclesiastical penalties on its editor, a far more visceral critic of Scholasticism, the Oratorian Lucien Laberthonnière.

It fell to two Jesuits, brothers by blood, Auguste and Albert Valensin, to defend the historical and theological legitimacy of Blondel's approach; both men would figure at different points in de Lubac's life. In their contributions to the prestigious Dictionnaire apologétique de la Foi catholique, the Valensins noted how one major difficulty Blondel's critics had identified depended on viewing the Blondelian ‘supernatural’ from the standpoint of a hypothetical ‘pure nature’ which, in concrete terms, has never existed. By speaking of the ‘necessity’ of the supernatural was he not fatally compromising the gratuity of grace? This was a foretaste of de Lubac's own difficulties to come.

For Auguste Valensin, Blondel's approach was justified by the fact that human beings may be not only supernaturally alive, through sanctifying grace, or supernaturally dead, through its rejection, but in what might be called a transitional condition, hovering between life and death. To change the metaphor, they may be anxious travellers in whom God is at work by prevenient ‘actual’ (as distinct from ‘habitual’) grace, indicating to them at various junctures, and in a manner more or less obscure, their need for the supernatural. To such anxious travellers, claimed Valensin, was Blondel's apologetic addressed.Footnote ¹⁹

Albert Valensin admitted that to speak of an exigence (‘demand’) for grace in the full or rigorous sense of that word ‘demand’ would lead to the confounding of grace and nature. He argued, though, that Blondel had in mind a nature that was already grace-pervaded. True, the question of how to inter-relate the two orders then recurs. The only acceptable solution, wrote this other Valensin, in good Scholastic style, must be in terms of the idea of the ‘obediential potency’, nature's capacity to receive grace and be raised to a higher power, a higher plane.Footnote ²⁰ That was a concept whose importance had recently been signalled by two other major players in the theological life of French Catholicism, the Dominican Antonin-Dalmace Sertillanges and the Jesuit Pierre Rousselot, though a great deal turned, and turns, on its fine-tuning.Footnote ²¹ For Albert Valensin (whom de Lubac would eventually succeed as professor of fundamental theology in the Institut Catholique of Lyons), the relation between human nature and the supernatural is an indirect one, it is a matter of ‘inefficacious desire’, and this is what the Blondelian analysis undertakes to explore. The overall view of the Valensin brothers – Blondel had described concretely existing humanity in a fashion in no way contrary to Church teaching – was diametrically opposed to those who considered L’Action essentially a philosophical anthropology of a sort that led to conclusions incompatible with orthodoxy. The notion that the supernatural is given in, with, and under the natural, though it may take a dialectical phenomenology to uncover it, might put informed readers in mind of mid-nineteenth century Güntherianismus. Anton Günther had regarded ‘spirit’, Geist, as the supernatural dimension of the human bonded to the body-soul composite of the Naturmensch. Footnote ²² Suggestively, both thinkers have occasionally received the sobriquet a ‘Catholic Hegel’, ‘our Hegel’.

Formation and First Writings

The Catholicism of de Lubac's family was deep-rooted. Though aristocratic, his parental culture was, he remembered, essentially based on Christian tradition and piety. From 1905, when the family moved to Lyons, his education was indebted to Jesuit schools. This sounds hard to reconcile with the account of the Church-State crisis given above. But in 1901 – by contrast with an earlier, more dramatic if also temporary, dissolution of Jesuit houses under the ‘Ferry decrees’ of 1880 to 1885 – the Jesuits behaved cannily in the face of the new laws. True, many went into exile – in the 1880s, and now for a second time, this was the origin of the French Jesuit houses of formation in the Channel Islands and on the English mainland. (Similar substitute training centres existed in the Low Countries, for demand was high: as many as a third of the ten thousand Jesuits world-wide were French.Footnote ²³) But wherever possible, the fathers of the Society put their colleges, whose teaching staff was rarely exclusively Jesuit, into the hands of so-called sociétés civiles propriétaires, thus guaranteeing, in many cases at least, the survival of not only the physical fabric but also the ethos.Footnote ²⁴ Transmission of the latter was aided by the discreet presence of Jesuit spiritual directors living off-site. (One such, Eugène Hains, would play a pivotal role in de Lubac's discovery of a vocation.Footnote ²⁵)

At the Jesuit college of Notre Dame de Mongré, at Villefranche-sur-Saône, and subsequently at Moulins Bellevue, de Lubac acquired an excellent formation in languages and rhetoric as well as a disciplined spiritual life, and emerged, as his fellow Jesuit Georges Chantraine put it, rooted in the soil of his country and the Church but also a fervent humanist, eagerly interested in everything that might count as authentic humanity.Footnote ²⁶ Not for nothing were his favourite authors Péguy and Claudel, to whom that description could also apply.Footnote ²⁷ He was briefly enrolled in the Law faculty of the Institut Catholique at Lyons before entering the noviciate of the Jesuit Province of Lyons at St Leonard's on Sea, in the unlikely setting of a stolid English watering-place, in October 1913. Here he encountered Auguste Valensin – and therefore, in a certain sense, Blondel.Footnote ²⁸ Looking back, de Lubac would judge Valensin a superlative mentor, paying him the enormous compliment of editing his posthumous works in seven volumes,Footnote ²⁹ along with three further volumes containing Valensin's correspondence with Blondel.Footnote ³⁰

The beginning of de Lubac's formal studies – humanities (a specialty of Jesuit formation reflecting the Society's Renaissance origins), followed by philosophy and theology – was postponed by the onset of the Great War, when he saw action in a highly specific sense of that word. He was seriously wounded, to lasting physical effect. With slightly uncanny symbolism, one injury was sustained at La Côte des Huves les Eparges where Rousselot had been killed two years previously in 1915. Discussion with an unbelieving comrade suggested a project later realized as De la connaissance de Dieu (1945), a work that attracted criticism for relying excessively on a pre-rational awareness of God and presenting the traditional proofs of God's existence as something rather softer: voies, ‘ways’. Did this do reason justice? Aquinas too had spoken of viae but with somewhat tighter argumentative formulae in mind. He was not likely to have contrasted voie with preuve.Footnote ³¹ Thomas did, however, avoid calling the ‘ways’demonstratio, as was pointed out a few years later by the unflaggingly Thomistic Jacques Maritain.Footnote ³²

With the Armistice, serious study began: initially, for a few months, at Canterbury where at Easter 1920 he made his Jesuit vows. Between 1920 and 1923, de Lubac pursued philosophical studies at the Maison Saint-Louis on Jersey; the principal ‘Ile anglo-normand’, it was half-way to home. Here, in company with Auguste Valensin, de Lubac engaged seriously with the seminal writings of Blondel as also with the works of Rousselot who has to be accounted a comparable influence on his early mind.Footnote ³³ He read too St Irenaeus's Against the Heresies and the Jesuit Léonce de Grandmaison's book-length article ‘Jésus Christ’ in the Dictionnaire apologétique, both foundational for his theological thought.Footnote ³⁴ Jersey, he thought in retrospect, had been the true seed-bed of his flowering as a Christian mind.Footnote ³⁵

Withdrawal from teaching schoolboys had meant that the more academically gifted French Jesuits could now give themselves exclusively to the intellectual life. These were for them golden years.Footnote ³⁶ Still, caught between their philosophical and theological tradition, Suarezianism, and the now papally recommended Thomism, there were also difficulties. This was not only a question of intellectual identity (de Lubac's enthusiasm for a personal card system of Thomas-citations was mildly mocked). It was also a matter of intellectual innovation. In the early 20s, the General of the Society issued warnings against Rousselot's theory of the ‘eyes of faith’–‘eyes’ that, for Rousselot, ‘saw’ a pattern non-believing observation would never find. This was a theory too subjective, so it was said, to be an adequate basis for apologetics.Footnote ³⁷ The fourth cahier of the Louvain Jesuit Joseph Maréchal's Point de départ de la Métaphysique, a founding text for ‘Transcendental Thomism’, failed to pass the Jesuit censors owing to its Rousselotisme. Footnote ³⁸ Did desire for the beatific vision define the nature of the human intellect? That was the startling question, with implications for the gratuity of the supernatural order, raised by Rousselot's 1908 L’intellectualisme de saint Thomas. Granted the affinity of Rousselot's problematic to that ascribed to the author of L’Action, it seems the more surprising de Lubac was allowed his intensive perusal of Blondel. Later he would cite Maréchal and Rousselot together with Blondel as the main sources of his early intellectual inspiration.Footnote ³⁹

Certainly Jersey was the location of de Lubac's earliest writings. Eight essays, treated no doubt as student ephemera and printed in amateur fashion in the bulletin of the Jesuit scholasticate Quodlibeta, betray a non-Scholastic epistemology for which the concept has value only from and through intuition – though de Lubac had in his sights not so much manual Scholasticism as the positivism for which the real is the objective as captured formulaically.Footnote ⁴⁰ In ‘Science et philosophie’, an essay co-authored in 1922 with his fellow Jesuit Gaston Fessard, a Blondelian, the ground for philosophy's difference from mathematics and science is given as the inhabiting of all philosophical problems by mystery.Footnote ⁴¹ Philosophy concerns itself with concrete totalities of which the first to be considered, by ‘reflexive analysis’, is the human subject, since subjectivity does not equal subjectivism. The data furnished by experience must so be investigated as to make appear that which transcends experience, for the transcendent is the necessary condition of the empirical. A sequel to ‘Science et philosophie’, unwritten or unfinished, was to have shown how this approach can rejoin the classic solutions of Scholastic epistemology. Instead, the traditional pattern of Jesuit formation intervened: de Lubac was whisked off for an ‘active’ year as assistant to the prefect of the studies at one of his old schools, the Lycée Mongré at Villefranche.

The French Jesuits in exile showed an extraordinary penchant for English seaside-resorts. Returning to Britain, de Lubac found himself, in the years 1924 to 1926, at Ore Place, Hastings – the ironically named ‘Seminarium Orense’,Footnote ⁴² this time for theology, under the tutelage of, in particular, the professor of sacred Scripture, Joseph Huby, a disciple of Rousselot and de Grandmaison. What Huby sought was a biblically grounded and philosophically acute new apologetics – in long perspective, a very de Lubacian desideratum.Footnote ⁴³ At Ore Place, de Lubac prepared as a student endeavour the first sketches of what would become, in 1946, Surnaturel. Etudes historiques. Making a study of the history of the doctrine of the supernatural was, by de Lubac's own admission, Huby's idea. That such an enquiry would prove detrimental – even fatal – to anti-Blondelian neo-Scholastic ‘extrinsicism’ on this topic was, in all likelihood, their common surmise.Footnote ⁴⁴

In 1927 Henri de Lubac was ordained priest. The previous year the Jesuits had returned in force to Lyons, re-establishing their college in the old quarter (‘forum vetus’) of Fourvières. In 1929 he was snapped up by the Institut Catholique there. De Lubac's 1929 inaugural lecture as professor of fundamental theology reflected the intellectual formation outlined above. ‘Apologétique et théologie’, for such was its title, sent the message that theology must not be reduced to the level of a positivistic rationalism.Footnote ⁴⁵ A separated philosophy, a separated theology, an apologetics based on ’natural faith’ or ‘scientific faith’: these are all untraditional and bring the Church's learning into disrepute. This is not how Augustine, Möhler, Newman, apologized. Even if apologetics and theology should not be identified, they must be inter-related. De Lubac warned against dividing theology from life by treating dogma as ‘a thing in itself, like a revealed block without relation of any sort to natural man, as a transcendent object whose manifestation (as indeed a great part of its content) is governed only by arbitrary divine decree’.Footnote ⁴⁶ As the Author of both supernature and nature, God is the Author of nature in view of grace. The supernatural order must not, however, be naturalized, nor the natural emptied of its substance.

Here we may look ahead to de Lubac's 1934 article, ‘Remarques sur l’histoire du mot “surnaturel”’, in which he testified to the study years when, so it turned out, he had devoured the writings not only of Thomas Aquinas and Augustine but also the Greek Fathers and the French ‘spiritualist’ thinker Maine de Biran as well as the trio of Rousselot, Maréchal, Blondel.Footnote ⁴⁷ Xavier de Tilliette has warned it would be a mistake to suppose that de Lubac's inspiration came chiefly from philosophy, however devout, or apologetics, however theological. The disclosure of the hidden God in saving mystêrion and sacramental sign, the God of Scripture and Tradition, was more foundational. De Lubac's emphasis on the divine transcendence, wrote Tilliette:

Scanning, then, the theological sources, de Lubac found that, while the word supernaturalis appears in Thomas's corpus, only with Pope Pius V's 1567 bull in condemnation of Baius (the Louvain theologian Michel du Bay) does it become a technical term, a matter of common parlance in the Schools. That was not, though, he pointed out, the only background. In fourteenth century mystics influenced by Denys and Thomas, ‘supernature’ means the divine life, whether in God himself or in the divinized creature. Whereas to Gregory of Nyssa, say (de Lubac admitted the story was different with Cyril of Alexandria), this vocabulary served for whatever allows a creature to share in divinity and so can denote even the gifts of intelligence and free will, in a later Latin theology ‘supernatural effects’ will mean precisely those extraordinary outcomes whose cause is not natural: for example, events taking place in a strictly miraculous manner – what the Neo-Scholastics would call supernaturale quoad modum. Since the mid seventeenth century, ‘supernatural’, used without further qualification, has commonly referred to human destiny in the vision of God, but stressing the gratuity of this divinely furnished end to the exclusion of any other consideration. In a decadent Scholasticism, the human spirit is not as such the imago Dei but just another natural entity awaiting free divine supernaturalisation, for the ‘normal and all-satisfying (saturant) end’ of the created spirit would not be the vision of God but a ‘natural end of an inferior order’.Footnote ⁴⁹ Under the influence of Scotism and (especially) Nominalism, the supernatural became merely what is ‘added onto nature’, the superadditum naturae.Footnote ⁵⁰ In the wake of the Baius controversy, the revelation of the supernatural could even seem a ‘disturbing element’, intervening in ‘the development of our race’, a ‘supernatural intrusion coming to break a perfect and fortunate equilibrium’. De Lubac concluded there was need for a rediscovery of finality of such a kind that people would realise the supernatural is not the adventitious. Rather, we were created for grace. Absent this realization, theology would continue to be the ‘unconscious accomplice of separated philosophy and secularism’.Footnote ⁵¹

Here Blondel could help, not only through the analysis made in L’Action, but also in the filaments of connexion he had made with ‘social Catholicism’. Blondel, who took part in the end-of-century ‘social congresses’ of the Church in France, had deplored the tendency to withdraw into a purely sacral realm of worship and devotion as monophorisme, a sort of practical Monophysitism, which, like the original Christological Monophysite theory, diminished the properly human scope of the divine Flesh-taking.Footnote ⁵² The option for the supernatural, de Lubac came to think, must entail a willingness to co-operate with God's work in the world in redemptioni communi.Footnote ⁵³ The work of redemption entails re-establishing the lost unity both of man with God and of men with men. The Christian mystery has to realize itself historically and socially. ‘Social Catholicism’ is a pleonasm; the adjective is redundant.Footnote ⁵⁴ Grace is not given purely in the individual relation of one human being with God. The index of its reception is the measure in which the individual aggregates himself socially as a member of the unique organism of the Church.Footnote ⁵⁵ In the 1934 essay, de Lubac noted that for the neo-pagan founder of positivisme organisateur, Charles Maurras, whose movement Action française had proved so attractive to patriotic Catholics, supernaturality was merely the Christian way of justifying ‘natural laws’.Footnote ⁵⁶‘Remarques’ was not only the harbinger of the continuingly controversial Surnaturel. It furnished one at any rate of the seeds for that luxuriant proliferation of a book, de Lubac's supremely influential work, Catholicisme. Les aspects sociaux du Dogme (1938).Footnote ⁵⁷

The Professor

When de Lubac arrived back in Lyons to begin his teaching career, he coincided with a moment of renaissance in that primatial local church of the ‘Gauls’. The Institut catholique's ‘Ecole lyonnaise de théologie’ was well-matched by a range of complementary institutions and activities: a philosophy institute; La Chronique sociale, inspiration (and chronicler) of the annual Semaines sociales de France; the initiatives of Cardinal Gerlier, archbishop of Lyons, in the lay apostolate, notably among the young; connexions with the missions through that apostle of an ‘inculturated’ Indian Church,the abbé Monchanin (on whom de Lubac would later write),Footnote ⁵⁸ and the nearby Jesuit study-house of Lyon-Fourvières whose membership included Fessard as teacher, the young Hans Urs von Balthasar as precocious student. (While de Lubac never belonged to its faculty, in 1934 he took up residence in the building. This was how Balthasar learned from him the need to refer ‘beyond Scholasticism to the Church Fathers’.Footnote ⁵⁹) At Lyons, early Catholic ecumenism was also represented, at reunions organized by one of the movement's heroes, the abbé Paul Couturier.

Replacing Albert Valensin as the only Jesuit in the theological teaching body of 1929–30 (Auguste Valensin was active in its philosophical opposite-number), de Lubac took responsibility for fundamental theology, extending his labours the following year, with Monchanin's assistance, to a new subject: the history of religions. In the climate of theological-philosophical-social-ecumenical openness that characterized the Church at Lyons in this period, de Lubac played his part, along with his colleagues Jean Daniélou and Claude Mondésert, in the inception of the influential series of patristic (and, later, mediaeval) texts called Sources chrétiennes, the brain-child of Victor Fontoynont, then prefect of studies at Fourvières. In Entretien autour de Vatican II. Souvenirs et Réflexions (1985) de Lubac recalls how this innocent venture was perceived as ‘a war-machine against Scholasticism and even the faith of the Church’.Footnote ⁶⁰ The introductions and comments to the Fathers’ texts certainly had a wider aim in view: to recover a theology of history, a fuller feeling for symbolism and the place of spiritual interpretation of Scripture, so as to renew theological and spiritual life. Considered as a scholarly project, the series was and remains exceedingly ambitious, with contributors from all over the country (and now far beyond). With the coming of the Second World War and the German invasion, de Lubac would take responsibility for the work in Vichy France, the Dominicans of the ‘Paris’ Province for the equivalent in the Occupied Zone.Footnote ⁶¹ In Mémoire sur l’occasion de mes Ecrits de Lubac lets fall that Sources chrétiennes were intended from the first as an ‘instrument of rapprochement’ with the Orthodox Church.Footnote ⁶²

The first great fruit of de Lubac's academic work was Catholicisme, put together from talks and articles written over the years 1932 to 1936. ‘Academic’ does not entirely strike the right note. For de Lubac, University-level teaching was not fully distinct from ministerial activity and hence from pastoral and missionary tasks. Catholicisme's ninth chapter, for instance, had been a lecture given to (mostly) Chinese students on the topic of the universality of the Catholic Church and Christianity at large; it was a crucial one, bearing the same title as the book itself. But aside from the opening chapter, which, with help from the Fathers, defines redemption as the re-establishment of humankind's unity in God, it was the tenth chapter, on the ‘present situation’, that set the scene for the work as a whole, despite its position towards the book's close. Judging by, at any rate, the French case, there was, de Lubac found, an unfortunate scission between the Church and the world, Christianity and history, the natural and the supernatural. That was ‘unfortunate’ because, as the fifth chapter, ‘Christianity and History’, makes plain, whereas for certain trends in Hellenic paganism and the Oriental religions, humanity has straightforwardly to transcend history, for the Church, by contrast, while the goal is to transcend history, history itself is to prepare for the goal. Irenaeus of Lyons, Augustine of Hippo, Clement of Alexandria, Eusebius of Caesarea, had found in the Bible virtually a ‘discourse on universal history’.Footnote ⁶³ They found it because they were looking for it. In Christianity, as they were aware, the Eternal is reached via time, for the Eternal has entered history so as to give time consistency and purpose. Fuga mundi, ‘flight from the world’, can still make sense, but only if the world we are fleeing is that of earthly things qua fallen, and the condition of those who love them sheerly for themselves.Footnote ⁶⁴ De Lubac's vision, as the German Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner wrote in an admiring review, was of ‘mankind…[as] a holy unity in Christ and in the Church’.Footnote ⁶⁵

De Lubac's emphasis on the ‘social aspects of dogma’ (the sub-title of this book) should not be mistaken for a recipe for collectivism, even though by implication there is a socio-political message.Footnote ⁶⁶ The ‘personalist’ eleventh chapter of the book supplies any corrective that may be needed. For de Lubac, a person is not just an atomic individual but a ‘universe’ which ‘supposes others likewise’.Footnote ⁶⁷ Personhood cannot be volatilized, de-substantialised, either by social analysis or by social forces. The City of God, de Lubac reminded readers, is constructed out of persons, vivis ex lapidibus, ‘from living stones’, in the words of Urbs beata Jerusalem, the hymn for the Dedication of a Church at Vespers of the Roman Liturgy.Footnote ⁶⁸

A summary comment on Catholicisme by Rahner's close collaborator Herbert Vorgrimler is well worthy of citation:

Somewhat more questionable is Vorgrimler's supplementary remark that, ‘from that moment on the work embodied the renewal of theology, anticipating what is best in the present-day ‘theology of earthly realities’.Footnote ⁷⁰ De Lubac's disclosure in Mémoire sur l’occasion de mes Ecrits that the book was inspired by Olympe-Philippe Gerbet's Considérations sur le dogme générateur de la piété catholique suggests Vorgrimler may have overestimated the element of self-conscious modernity.Footnote ⁷¹ Gerbet, after all, who became bishop of Perpignan in 1854, wrote his book while the last Bourbon king to be anointed at Rheims was still (fairly) gloriously reigning.

The communitarianism of Catholicisme, we have said, was for de Lubac personalist in character. The struggle for defence of the rights of persons – notably, Jewish persons – in which de Lubac was engaged in the ‘years of resistance’, 1940 to 1944, in the context of the Vichy government's frequently supine attitude to its overbearing German patron, would soon give this insistence concrete form. The troubled history of Jewish-Catholic relations under the Third Republic – the prominence of Protestants, Freemasons and Jews in succeeding Republican and anti-clerical governments did little to mollify a sporadic Catholic antagonism toward the Judaism of the Common EraFootnote ⁷²– set the Vichy regime on a false course. Its self-appointed mission to reverse the wrongs suffered by the anti-Revolutionary elements in French society was by no means indefensible. But it was easily ensnared. The misinformation Marshal Pétain received, to the effect that Pius XII would support legislation restricting Jewish liberties, was met by the Déclaration Chaine, which recalled with some force the Church's past condemnations of anti-Semitism. Partly written by de Lubac, the ‘Declaration’ was named for its principal spiritus movens, the Institut Catholique's professor of Old Testament and pastor of the University parish. Gerlier sanctioned its anonymous circulation at Lyons; meanwhile the authors published across the Swiss border at Fribourg, with help from the future Cardinal Journet, their Israël et la foi chrétienne, giving theological weight to their stance. Outside the Occupied Zone the capital of France was of course Vichy itself, a spa town in the Massif Central, but Lyons was the intellectual capital of the resistance, drawing to itself the leading French Catholic writers still at large in the ‘Hexagon’: the dramatist-philosopher Gabriel Marcel, the poet Paul Claudel, the philosopher of personalist communitarianism Emmanuel Mounier, and others besides. German pressure on Vichy to release its Jews into the tender cares of the National Socialist regime was a test of the soul for the Catholic Church in those regions, as Fessard pointed out in stirring terms in his France, prends garde de perdre ton âme. Of the clandestine cahiers (Cahiers de Témoignage Chrétien) that went the rounds, rehearsing pertinent themes in an effort to rouse Church resistance to deportations of French Jews, it is difficult now to identify de Lubac's personal contributions. But he gave his own account of the period in a substantial memoir, Résistance chrétienne à l’antisémitisme. Souvenirs 1940–1944 (1988). At times, de Lubac had himself to change venue rather swiftly, yet he was never in the kind of danger run by his confrère Yves de Montcheuil, shot by the Nazis in 1944 for ministering to students in the (armed) Resistance, le maquis.Footnote ⁷³ De Lubac's war was a war of literary propaganda.

This was also the time of his writing two very different studies, one looking beyond the Church, one directed to life within it. The first was Le Drame de l’humanisme athée (1944) whose message, already indicated in the pre-existent articles from which the book was composed, ran along the following lines: a humanism that disencumbers itself of God's uniquely foundational presence tends to self-destruction. It is probably fair to say that de Lubac's reflections on the value of persons in Catholicisme and the anti-Nazism the political situation brought to the fore, combined to motivate this enquiry into the intellectual sources of atheist humanism's ‘drama’. The tragic error of such humanism lay at its beginning, in the initial option to reject the thesis of the divine image in man. The consequent unilateral declaration of independence of man from God leads to Prometheanism and its upshot in Western history is a catastrophe. Though the book was at he time much translated, in the post-Conciliar period when ‘progressive’ figures among the French Jesuits (if not only they!) were treating Feuerbach, Marx and Nietzsche as maîtres à penser, indispensable intellectual interlocutors if not indeed guides, Le Drame de l’athéisme humain was roughly handled. Its author, so it was said, had failed to understand modernity and the resources it could offer. Lines of connexion run out from this work to Proudhon et le Christianisme of the following year (the study of a very un-Marxian Socialist), to Affrontements mystiques, with its re-engagement with Nietzsche, in 1950, and even to the trilogy of ‘Buddhist’ works, Aspects du bouddhisme (1951), Le rencontre du bouddhisme et de l’Occident (1952), Amida. Aspects du bouddhisme II (1955), inasmuch as Buddhism could be considered a ‘vertical atheism’, to set alongside the ‘horizontal atheism’ of the West. Not that de Lubac's cast of mind was simply critical of the non-Christian alternatives. In Le Fondement théologique des missions (1946) he spoke of the evangelical imperative by which the Church must enter into transformative contact with diverse civilizations. Just because she is Catholic – universal – she must assume and complete all well-founded human thinking or her mission will be paralysed.

The 1944 work directed ad intra was Corpus mysticum. L’Eucharistie et l’Eglise au Moyen Age. Etude historique. Intrigued by a doctoral thesis he examined on Florus of Lyons, de Lubac used a period of convalescence to delve further into the pre-Scholastic Latin writers whom he came to regard as not just preparation for what was to come later. On the contrary, they had an abiding value all their own. In principle, after all, some motifs might well be better embodied in earlier thinkers than in later. De Lubac held that one such motif was the relation between the Church and the Holy Eucharist. These two mysteries are not thought together in High Scholasticism to the degree they are in the Fathers, the Carolingian divines, and their successors up to (but not including) Anselm.Footnote ⁷⁴ Though, to be sure, the High Scholastics appreciate that the unity of the Church is the ultimate goal (res tantum) of Eucharistic communion, they do not find the mystery of the Church-body actualized in the sacred action in the way of their predecessors. Concern for the Real Presence had tended to eliminate a fruitful ambiguity in the term ‘the body of Christ’ (though the ambiguity was retained in many liturgical prayers), just as preoccupation with the ontology of that Presence had muted somewhat its eschatological dimension, the pledge of participation in the ‘banquet’ of the End. De Lubac put down much of this to a shift in theological culture, ‘from symbol to dialectic’.Footnote ⁷⁵ If a symbolic mode of practicing theology is seen as not only outclassed but rendered redundant by a more dialectical mode, then the unifying conception which treated the selfsame reality as at once plena mysterii and plena rationis cannot stand. And yet, asked de Lubac, is it not significant that the same word (logos) denotes both human reason and the Word (le Verbe) of God?Footnote ⁷⁶

Corpus mysticum would incur criticism. Its message ran, there is more to be said about the Mass than the Eucharistic conversion, the source of Presence and Sacrifice, for the Eucharist also ‘makes the Church’.Footnote ⁷⁷ To the mind of Augustine and the early mediaeval divines, the Holy Eucharist, itself a mystery, indeed Christ's corpus mysticum, figured forth the unity of the Church, Christ's caro spiritualis, his ‘spiritual flesh’. De Lubac's enthusiastic commendation of such thinking was readily confused with a claim that the theme of the Eucharistic conversion – of bread and wine into the Body and Blood of the Word incarnate – had been overplayed. He had said nothing of the sort. He had merely asked, ‘Could not Eucharistic realism have been assured without the almost total abandonment of symbolism?’Footnote ⁷⁸ If he regretted that Eucharistic devotion had sometimes become ‘individualistic’, it was because as a consequence the idea of the Church had become ‘less and less realist, because less and less mystical’.Footnote ⁷⁹

With hindsight, some of the anxieties expressed by reviewers – travelling back down this road, could the gains that were made in clarifying the doctrine of the Presence be endangered?– might appear to have validity. But who in the 1940s could have guessed how attenuated would be the sense of the Real Presence in wide areas of the Western Catholic Church by the early years of the twenty-first century? De Lubac's study can be considered a Catholic counterpart to the Orthodox orchestration of that theme by the ‘Paris School’ Russian exile Nikolai Afanas’ev.Footnote ⁸⁰ In Orthodoxy, has Eucharistic ecclesiology jeopardized the sense of what is bestowed in the Holy Gifts? It seems unlikely. And it remains the case that no Eucharistic theology should lack all reference to the thesis Eucharistia facit Ecclesiam de Lubac made his own. As he had remarked in Catholicisme, the Church herself teaches it – in the words of her Liturgies.Footnote ⁸¹

The peace that broke out amid warring nations in 1944–5 was soon followed by the publication of a work that produced a theological war on a smaller, and fortunately unbloody, scale. What made the reaction to the 1946 Surnaturel. Etudes historiques especially surprising was that, yet again (as with Catholicisme and Le Drame), de Lubac was recycling. The first three chapters had already appeared in the Jesuit journal Recherches de science religieuse while much of the book's later sections had seen the light of day in an even more conventional periodical, the Bulletin de littérature ecclésiastique. De Lubac found there was much to complain of in sixteenth century Scholasticism. The idea that natural appetite cannot refer to anything supernatural had gradually percolated from commentaries on Thomas's Summa theologiae to commentaries on that still ubiquitous mediaeval textbook, Lombard's Books of the Sentences. The idea of potentia oboedientalis, comparatively minor in High Scholastic thought where it was in common employ for explaining the possibility of miracle, took on major importance as nature's relation to its own assumption by divine act was deemed a mere ‘non-repugnance’ to divine power. Where de Lubac was on shakier ground was in the claim that, when Thomists spoke of the ‘elicited’ desire of the natural man for beatitude, this should mean – if they were faithful to the historical St Thomas – the manifestation of innate desire, rather than the bringing forth of desire in a new mode as humans ponder divine effects.Footnote ⁸² But de Lubac was right to say the biblical and patristic theme of man as the image of God could never be reduced to the dimensions of an Aristotelean ‘nature’. The language of de Lubac's criticism of Cajetan, perhaps the outstanding Thomist of the Reformation era, is, as Antonio Russo noted, markedly Blondelian. What de Lubac rejects in the emergent new consensus about ‘pure nature’ is ‘extrinsicism’ and, accordingly, a ‘separated’ philosophy and theology.Footnote ⁸³

De Lubac's criticisms of the Scholastic, and notably Thomistic, tradition as it had developed were by no means an assault on Thomas himself for whom he retained the highest respect. Since Jersey days he had been working on an exhaustive filing system for Thomas texts, to the amusement of his professors whose tastes were more eclectic. In Catholicisme, however, he had said in as many words that no single author can ever capture the whole of revealed truth. In Surnaturel he went on to suggest the need for a new synthesis, taking account of the theological forces of the past and the acquisitions of the present. More than its particular claim about the nature/grace relation, this was why the book entered so rapidly the controversial web of la nouvelle théologie. Though de Lubac had sought to distinguish the meanderings of theological progress from the linear development of dogma, it could hardly be denied that, at all times, dogma had needed, and utilized, theology. If theological culture was so mutable and relative, could dogma wholly stand? The ‘new theologians’ were held to have been too sceptical about the value of conceptual knowledge, too credulous about claims concerning its contingent and inadequate character vis-à-vis revealed truth. They exaggerated the instability of the notions in which divine truth was expressed. They were imprudent in asserting that the content of dogma and theology can and must be articulated in concepts drawn from contemporary philosophy:Footnote ⁸⁴ a proposal more associated, perhaps, with Daniélou than with de Lubac.Footnote ⁸⁵

The 1950 encyclical Humani generis brought together critics of de Lubac's particular thesis about nature with critics of the general approach to theological life laid out, or tacit, in la nouvelle théologie– even if the question, Did Pius XII have de Lubac specifically in mind? may never be answered to universal satisfaction. In 1959, the Congregation of Seminaries and Universities reported that no censure had ever been issued against him.Footnote ⁸⁶ That he was treated as something of a scapegoat there is no doubt, but the measures taken against him appear to have had their source in the Society itself. From 1950 to 1959 he was prohibited from teaching, and for some of those years from living in Jesuit scholasticates in whose libraries some at any rate of his books and articles found themselves shunted off open shelves to more secure areas.Footnote ⁸⁷ The second and third of his ‘Buddhist’ trilogy reflect the veto on publishing any more strictly theological works in the years 1950 to 1952. But by 1953, when his Méditation sur l’Eglise saw the light of day, this embargo had already been lifted.Footnote ⁸⁸ In the same year, he was given permission to lecture on non-theological subjects, with the curious caveat that no advance notice should be given to the public: a paradox, but not of the pregnant sort he made his own in a genre of sequenced comments rather like the ‘Chapters’ of the Greek ascetical writers of earlier ages: see Paradoxes (1946), Nouveaux Paradoxes (1955). In 1956 he was allowed to reply publicly to his critics in a post-face to a revised De la connaissance de Dieu, now re-issued as Sur les chemins de Dieu. Footnote ⁸⁹ In 1958 Pius XII asked that papal gratitude should be passed on to him (informally) for Méditation sur l’Eglise. Finally, in 1959 the Jesuit General invited him to return to teaching.

The years 1956 to 1964 were dominated by research for his great four volume study of mediaeval exegesis. Exégèse mediévale. Les quatre sens de l’Ecriture I, 1–2 (1959); II, 1 (1961); II. 2 (1964), which built on an earlier study of Origen's biblical interpretation, Histoire et Esprit. L’intelligence de l’Ecriture d’après Origène (1950), sought to reinstate spiritual exegesis as an ‘ecclesial sense’ of the Bible, not over against the historical sense intended by the authors of Scripture but encompassing it in a wider whole. That was possible because spiritual exegesis was habitually preoccupied by the overall structure of Scripture, whose own axis is the relation between promise and fulfillment. Such exegesis, as practised by mediaeval writers, furnished, in fact, a theology of history, such as de Lubac had taught his readers to expect in Catholicisme, as well as a theology of the Bible itself. The chief message, as he explained in Mémoire sur l’occasion de mes Ecrits, was the essential unity of the two Testaments.Footnote ⁹⁰ For readers who lacked the attention span to do the work justice, he produced two years later a concise summary, L’Ecriture dans la Tradition (1966). In 1983 the formidable Oxford historian of mediaeval exegesis, Beryl Smalley, would admit in a preface to the third edition of her The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages that someone had overtaken her.Footnote ⁹¹

The unfolding of his grandiose synthesis of mediaeval biblical lore was punctuated by three books in defence of his deceased confrère Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. In La Pensée religieuse du Père Teilhard de Chardin (1962) de Lubac provides a benign interpretation of Teilhard's rather uncertain metaphysical rhetoric, undertaking to interpret him from the spiritual intuitions which surface most plainly in his letters. He denied that evolution plays a redemptive role in Teilhard's scheme, while admitting his attempt to re-articulate doctrine in a scientific (if also romantically poetic) manner is by no means entirely successful. In July 1962, on the publication of de Lubac's study, the Vatican daily Osservatore romano published a ‘monitum’ giving notice of some dangers in de Lubac's advocacy. John XXIII's Holy Office wished to go further, and pronounce a formal condemnation (on both Teilhard's writing and de Lubac's study), but the Pope was opposed. In 1964 de Lubac would bring out a less controversial sequel, La Prière du Père Teilhard de Chardin. Re-presenting Teilhard as among the Church's spirituels rather than her divines or philosophers did not mean, though, he had given up on him as a Christian cosmologist. The 1966 study Teilhard, missionaire et apologiste, based on two lectures given in Rome, presents him not only as a missionary in the line of Paul but an apologist for the immortality of the soul and the existence of God.Footnote ⁹² Looking back from the vantage-point of 1981, however, de Lubac would judge ‘Teilhardism’, the work of unsubtle interpreters, whether enthusiasts or detractors, ‘unworthy of attention’.Footnote ⁹³

The Cardinal

By 1966 Rome was a place de Lubac knew well. After his years in the wilderness, John XXIII rehabilitated him comprehensively by appointing him, in 1960, consultor to the Preparatory Theological Commission of the Second Vatican Council which itself would meet from 1962 to 1965. The friendship he formed with Karol Wojtyła of Cracow, as they worked together in ‘Schema 13’, the later Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the World,Footnote ⁹⁴ would have an unexpected outcome. Visiting France as Pope John Paul II, the new Pope declared (in 1980), ‘I bow my head before Father de Lubac’, making him a cardinal in the subsequent Consistory of 1983.Footnote ⁹⁵

The post-Conciliar years were not especially happy ones for de Lubac. Despite – or because of – his place on the prestigious Pontifical International Theological Commission, sections of the French Church, not excluding Jesuits, treated him as yesterday's man. His reservations about such typical phenomena of the post-Conciliar epoch as liturgical revision, or national Episcopal Conferences and their attendant bureaucracies, were well-known. More seriously, behind the multitudinous concerns of late modernity, Churchmen, he felt, were in danger of losing to view what should be at the centre of their field of vision, the mystery of Christ. The loss of a sense of divine transcendence in Western culture had replicated itself in the Church whose own mystery was undergoing occlusion likewise.Footnote ⁹⁶ He had sharp words for Catholics who were indifferent to tradition, or treated it with either ‘open contempt or spiteful resentment’,Footnote ⁹⁷ deploring especially the ‘frightening lack of intelligence and culture’ among the clergy, which ‘leaves them defenceless before all the most contradictory speculations’.Footnote ⁹⁸ The removal from influence, in the course of the 1950s, of the representatives of la nouvelle théologie had not strengthened orthodoxy but left clerics and laity exposed to the neo-Modernist virus.Footnote ⁹⁹ The documents of the Second Vatican Council had suffered hermeneutic distortion to the point that the real Council had disappeared behind a ‘para-Council’ of the interpreters’ own making.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ In 1965 he resigned from the board of the journal Concilium on the ground that the publication did not live up to its title. Invited to sign its 1968 ‘Declaration on the Liberty and Function of Theologians in the Church’, he declined in no uncertain terms, commenting subsequently that the theologians in question ‘enjoyed in reality every freedom of expression and were in fact looking to impose their own dictatorship’.Footnote ¹⁰¹ As with a number of other theologians of the Council who sought to make good its unintended devastation, he transferred his allegiance in 1975 to the rival review, Communio.

De Lubac did not receive the barracking that Daniélou – a figure with a far higher, and deliberately cultivated, media profile – suffered for a similar (Church-) political incorrectness. Nor did he rival Daniélou in the latter's copious stream of polemical corrective or therapeutical writing. But the appearance in 1989 of Mémoire sur l’occasion de mes Ecrits showed well enough – even better than the interview with Angelo Scola, now patriarch of Venice, published four years earlier as Entretien autour de Vatican II– that, like Daniélou, he could respond with acerbity. The previous paragraph, in laying out items from his list of gravamina, has drawn on it already. So here it may suffice to recall by way of summary how he made his own these words from a saddened but dignified address by the second pope of the Council, Paul VI: ‘We did not expect this phenomenon of intolerant agitation and even subversion devised by the people of our own house’.Footnote ¹⁰² The long years that passed until de Lubac's death in 1991 at the age of 95 gave him the chance to observe the embryonic transformation worked by Pope John Paul II, as well as to finish numerous projects, putting his literary house in final order.

Under the latter rubric I include his replies to critics of Surnaturel. In Le Mystère du surnaturel (1965) he built on the 1941 article of that name, with a preface which argued for the (even) greater timeliness of his interventions. Dualism was back with a vengeance in practice as ‘nature’ was increasingly abandoned to the tender mercies of civil progressivism, secularism, historicism, absolute immanentism: a criticism repeated in his ‘Gaudium et Spes’ book, the 1967 Athéisme et le sens de l’homme.Footnote ¹⁰³ The same year, 1965, saw his Augustinisme et théologie moderne which expanded upon the first part of the old Surnaturel with a further dossier of texts from theological history.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The eminent Gregorian theologian Charles Boyer made plain his original reservations stood.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Antinomic statements about the mind necessarily desiring the vision of God as a free gift might sound fine to de Lubac for whom paradox, familiar in the rhetorical tropes of the Fathers, was an expectant quest for synthesis.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ They needed careful explanation and qualification to be acceptable to Scholastics, Neo- or even, at times, Palaeo- in orientation.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Into the same category of ‘reply’ may be put de Lubac's Petite Catéchèse sur nature et grâce of fifteen years later (1980). It was his last book-length attempt to say again and better what he had meant in Surnaturel, and is important for introducing into the discussion Trinitarian and Christological analogies for the kind of union enjoyed by the orders of nature and grace. To speak in this regard of ‘circumincession’ suggests the disputed question of their interrelation might best be served by reference to the orthodox theology of the Trinity,Footnote ¹⁰⁸ where the Persons indwell each other. To allude in this connection to the Chalcedonian union as a model for understanding the relations involved was reminiscent of how Etienne Gilson, a strong sympathizer with Surnatural, had come to find in Chalcedonian Christology, with its doctrine of the unconfused union of divine and human, the key to the companion issue of the interrelation of the orders of reason and faith.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

The crisis in the Church drew from the author of the War-time Méditation sur l’Eglise not only directly ecclesiological studies, seeking to correct contemporary unilateralisms, as in Paradoxe et mystère de l’Eglise (1967), L’Eglise dans la crise actuelle (1969), and Les églises particulières dans l’Eglise universelle (1977),Footnote ¹¹⁰ but also in-depth enquiries into the faith once delivered to the saints, as in La Foi chrétienne, essai sur la structure du Symbole des Apôtres (1969) and Dieu se dit dans l’histoire, la Révélation divine (1974), a slimmed down version of his 1968 commentary on the preamble and opening chapter of the Conciliar Constitution on Divine Revelation, Dei Verbum: La Révélation divine, of which an expanded edition would be published in 1983. In all three formats, the book is typified, like Dei Verbum itself, by Christological concentration.Footnote ¹¹¹ A similarly fundamental text gave its name to the volume Mistica e mistero cristiano, appearing in Italian before it saw the light of day in French.Footnote ¹¹² The publishing arm of the Italian ‘new movement’Communione e liberazione thought de Lubac worthy of a collected edition of his writings (planned from 1978) well before the French did (by 1997, the centenary of his birth, only three volumes had appeared out of a projected forty-nine in a collaborative enterprise of the Association International Cardinal Henri de Lubac and the Dominican publishing house Editions du Cerf: the series remains to date uncompleted).

De Lubac continued to write on figures he found compelling, not least if their influence on ecclesial or theological life was weighty. In Recherches dans la foi. Trois études sur Origène, saint Augustin, et la philosophie chrétienne (1979), this included a possibly predictable return to Origen and Augustine, but it also involved branching out to visit a relatively little studied Renaissance figure, the Dominican tertiary Pico della Mirandola, whom he praised for letting the Incarnation throw light on the philosophical quest (an ally, evidently, against ‘separated’ philosophy and theology): thus Pic de la Mirandole. Etudes et discussions (1974). It entailed, too, tracing the long-lasting if subterranean influence of that great heretic of the theology of history, the twelfth century Calabrian abbot Joachim of Fiore, whom La postérité spirituelle de Joachim de Flore (1979–1981) identified as the source of the Western cult of social utopias, which was certainly flourishing in the Paris of 1968 and its aftermath. Where Catholic Christians treat such utopias as substitutes for the Kingdom of God, Joachimism was, for de Lubac, a remote cause of the contemporary ‘self-destruction of the Church’.Footnote ¹¹³

Like many writers, de Lubac was happy to see isolated essays brought together in collected form, Footnote ¹¹⁴ and to trace the genealogy of his own literary production.Footnote ¹¹⁵ What was more unusual, and a testimony to his rare generosity of spirit, was the dedication he brought to the editing of the correspondence of others. I have mentioned already the three volume edition of exchanges between Valensin and Blondel. But de Lubac also brought out a two volume correspondence of Blondel with a comparatively minor figure on the edge of the Modernist circle, the abbé Joannès Wehrlé;Footnote ¹¹⁶ the letters that went between Fessard and Marcel;Footnote ¹¹⁷ two volumes of Teilhard's letters,Footnote ¹¹⁸ and Etienne Gilson's periodic communications with de Lubac himself.Footnote ¹¹⁹

A Proposal

De Lubac observed that in so diverse a collection of writings as his own looking for a highly personal philosophical or theological synthesis would be a fruitless endeavour.Footnote ¹²⁰ Unity, however, is an obvious preoccupation throughoutFootnote ¹²¹– unity of God with man in Le Drame, of human beings with each other in and through God in Catholicisme, the unity of nature and grace in Surnaturel and its later refinements, the unity of Scripture in Exégèse mediévale, the Eucharistic unity of the Church in Corpus mysticum, her mysteric and social unity in his other ecclesiological writings, the unity of philosophy and theology in Pic de la Mirandole,Footnote ¹²² the unity of salvation history in his critique of Joachimism.Footnote ¹²³ He uses the Introduction to Catholicisme to stake out a claim for the ‘deep unity’ in which all the ‘immense army of witnesses’ of Tradition down the ages meet together, ‘faithful to the one Church, living by the same faith in the same Holy Spirit’.Footnote ¹²⁴ In the perspective thus outlined, his total oeuvre may be said to represent Hans Urs von Balthasar's ‘missing’ transcendental, for Balthasar's trilogy should really have been a tetralogy, with the same analogical imagination set to work on unum, the one, as was shown with pulchrum, the beautiful, in the theological aesthetics, bonum, the good, in the theological dramatics, and verum, the true, in the theological logic.

At one level, this concern for unum may have been temperamental, fed, perhaps, by the inescapable feeling, for an exiled Jesuit, of the painful duality in the soul of France. But more profoundly, de Lubac had as the cynosure of his overall literary venture, indeed of his life, an unachieved project. It was a book on the mystical to which all else would be related, a work he not only did not write but could not. As he lamented in 1956, the ‘centre always eludes me’.Footnote ¹²⁵ That centre was, I propose, the mystical envisaging of the point of convergence of the various unities de Lubac had explored or fostered in his work. It was not surprising it escaped him. How could it be anything other than the ineffable visio Dei, source, still concealed in the temple of the Lamb, of all the economic manifestations of God?

For the faith of the Church, it is not the case that in that vision all distinctions are elided in a sea of omnitude. Nor, despite his love of unities, did de Lubac think so. A comparison with a French Catholic thinker of like stature, but closer connected with the Dominican Order than with the Society, may be useful. On the title page of Jacques Maritain's most celebrated book, Les Dégrés du savoir, appear the words Distinguer pour unir, which we should not be wrong in taking for his ruling maxim. De Lubac's unwritten master-work, I suggest, would have as its spectral title a phrase equally revealing: Unir, sans méconnaître les distinctions (he himself preferred the more gnomic – paradoxical?– formula unir pour distinguer Footnote ¹²⁶). As he wrote in a letter to Blondel, citing the latter's ‘Philosophical Journey’:

There may be disagreement about how successfully de Lubac united things, in pursuit of his lode-star, the ordo rerum ad Deum considered as a differentiated unity in the mystery of Christ.Footnote ¹²⁸ For Catholic students, there can hardly be disagreement as to the value of his metaphysical and doctrinal intention.