A Trauma of SIlence: The Life and Work of Henri De Lubac (Part Four)
No God, No Man: de Lubac as (Mystical-Aesthetic) Apologist
“The
sole passion of my life is the defense of our faith.”[1] Yet having read this statement de Lubac’s
form of apologetics is not a usual one.
We might, for the sake of simplicity, summarize it with two themes: that
God is the only coherence of man; and that, conversely, where God is denied,
true humanity is as well. This positive
and negative statement of the same reality—two sides of a single coin, as it
were—also neatly describe the relation that The
Drama of Atheist Humanism and The
Discovery of God have to one another—the former could be called the
“negative moment” to the latter, which, conversely, would be the former’s
“positive moment.” The negative moment
assumes that by examining the thought of atheist humanism—here de Lubac takes
Feuerbach, Marx, Auguste Comte, and Nietzsche as his main exemplars—these
systems will inevitably be shown to be their own worst enemy precisely because
they suppress the fact that the whole of man’s life is a questioning after God:
“atheistic humanism was bound to end in bankruptcy. Man is himself only because his face is illuminated
by a divine ray.”[2] Or more fully:
For man, God is not only a norm [a
la Kant] that is imposed upon him and, by guiding him, lifts him up again: God
is the Absolute upon which he rests, the Magnet that draws him, the Beyond that
calls him, the Eternal that provides him with the only atmosphere in which he
can breath and, in some sort, that third dimension in which man finds his
depth. If man takes himself as God, he
can, for a time, cherish the illusion that he has raised and freed himself. But it is a fleeting exaltation! In reality, he has merely abased God, and it
is not long before he finds that in doing so he has abased himself.[3]
One can immediately detect a sort of
“poetic mysticism” or lyrical nature of his theology. This is not by accident, or merely the
flourish of a gifted writer. We must
recall that one of the major diagnoses of modern culture set forward by de
Lubac:
What is lacking is taste for
God. The most distressing diagnosis that
can be made of the present age, and the most alarming, is that to all
appearances at least it has lost the taste for God. Man prefers himself…if the taste returned, we
may be sure that the proofs would be restored…so in the matter of God, whatever
certain people may be tempted to think, it is never the proof [for God] that is lacking…[4]
Thus
while de Lubac never quite puts its so, we would be remiss not to point that it
there is a necessary “aesthetic” dimension to apologetics which does not merely
provide intellectual counters (or positive proofs), but also is a direct
attempt to link humanity back up to God, who “is the hearth from which the
souls of men, like so many lamps, take their light.”[5] Thus in this aspect apologetics cannot, for
de Lubac, be separated from proper Christian living, or what he terms
“sainthood”:
When we meet a saint, we are not discovering
at long last an ideal, lived and realized, which had already been formed within
us. A saint is not the perfection of
humanity—or of the superman—incarnate in a particular man. The marvel is of a different order. What we find is a new life, a new sphere of
existence, with unsuspected depths—but also with a resonance hitherto unknown
to us and at last revealed.[6]
And
The witness of the saints does not
produce an automatic effect. Nor can it
be generalized in the same way as a rational proof. But when it is efficacious, it is an
altogether different thing and not a simple and inferior form of proof.[7]
In
its fullest form apologetics is a Christ-like life. For de Lubac, then, apologetics is in some
sense a task to reawaken to unbeliever to the mystery that always already
constitutes their life and thought, even if they do not know it or would not
recognize it unless shown (here we can see how this strategy of apologetics
correlates with de Lubac’s denial of “pure nature”—mankind is homo religiosis, the religious creature,
in constant search for God, the God whom they do not realize has already found them).
In its most holistic aspect, then, apologetics is about the entire
orientation of a life, not merely this or that question (though as we shall see
de Lubac by no means rejects proofs for God, merely is adamant, in a way akin
to Pressupositionalists, about the location and function of such proofs). In this way it is good to recall too that de
Lubac notes the types of atheism he is dealing with are not ones interested in
merely disproving God, but of constructing fully and wholly self-complete
systems where the question of God could not even be raised: “Heidegger’s system
(for example) did not just deny God, but was intent on completing and securing
the philosophical circle outside any use of the theistic hypothesis, so that
the question of God could not even be raised.”[8]
But this
ultimately causes the destruction of man, who in no real (as opposed to
imagined or artificed) way, is ever separate from reliance on God,
ontologically, epistemologically, or otherwise.
In this sense such atheist humanism is, for de Lubac, the systematic
employment of sinfulness, i.e. self-reliance as opposed to God-reliance. But this can only cause the erasure of humanity. Take here a few juxtaposed quotes and one
begins to see a picture emerge, both regarding the ferocity with which de Lubac
fought against “pure nature,” and why a seemingly obscure metaphysical debate
is of the utmost importance:
Through it [the Christian view of
man] man was freed in his own eyes, from the ontological slavery with which
Fate burdened him…Man, every man, no matter who, had a direct link with the
Creator, the Ruler of the stars themselves…It was no longer a small and select
company which, thanks to some secret means of escape, could break the charmed
circle: it was mankind as a whole which fought its night suddenly illumined and
took cognizance of its royal liberty. No
more circle [i.e. endlessly repeating cycle]!
No more blind hazard [oh Fate where is thy sting?]…Hence that intense
feeling of gladness and of radiant newness to be found everywhere in early
Christian writings.[9]
But this newness
did not last, and we can now see the full force of the importance of de Lubac’s
narrative of “pure nature,”:
They were dooming themselves to see
[the supernatural order] as merely a kind of superstructure. It followed inevitably that man could not
only have managed quite well without it, but that even now he could with impunity
disregard it. It was deprived of any
hold on human thinking or human existence.
Christian thought was thus bounded
by a narrow circle, in a quiet backwater of the intellectual universe,
where it could only waste away. By the
good offices of some of its own exponents, who were aiming to preserve its
transcendence, it became merely an ‘exile.’
The price is heavy, but has the longed-for peace at least been gained by
it? Far from it. Any repose of mind gained so easily can only
be artificial. It does not express that
harmony which can result only from overcoming opposition. Reason, which has been suppressed, will have
its revenge all too soon by declaring that in such conditions the supernatural
as presented to it, as forced upon it,
is merely an illusion…[10]
But,
as Voderholzer aptly puts it, “man does not only have a longing for the absolute, but his very existence is that longing.”[11] Thus, since “man without God is dehumanized”[12]
de Lubac also notes slyly “the atheist is often the greatest help the believer
can have,”[13]
because the absolute can never be fully abandoned—it always creeps into the
back door of atheist thought (“Empty the heavens, and they are at once occupied
by an army of myths.”)[14] This has two equal but opposite
implications. The first is that since
the very grandiose idea of humanity’s royalty was given by Christianity, the atheist’s own humanistic pretensions are but
the afterglow of historically demonstrable Christian impulses, now denied the
fire that gave them constant heat (“if the fire dies, the reflected gleam [in
man] immediately goes out”[15]):
“A keen eye can still detect the ‘theft of sacred things’ at the source of
categories which are in their appearance most profane…a parasite that draws
life from Christian substance.”[16]
And
conversely, whatever their parasitical nature they cannot maintain the
integrity they once had as concepts within the greater system of Christianity:
“What has become of man as conceived by this atheist humanism? [Without an
absolute horizon] a being that can hardly still be called a being—a thing that
has no content, a cell completely merged in a mass that is in the process of
becoming…”[17]
Thus the double critique: atheist humanism dissolves man by doing away with
God; and what it attempts to keep is anyway the original property of the
Christian, deprived now of the original context in which such values made any
sense in the first place. But before
this becomes too ponderous let us take de Lubac’s critique of Nietzsche as an
example.
De
Lubac’s basic criticism of Nietzsche is humorously summarized by de Lubac’s
claim that at the end of the day Nietzsche is an impoverished mystic. He demonstrates this by arguing that two of
Nietzsche’s major ideas—that of the Overman, and that of the Eternal Return—not
only contradict each other, but demonstrate that even Nietzsche at the end of
the day could not build a system without some sort of appeal to a (certain
type) of transcendence. While the
concept of the Overman is well known, the Eternal Return is not so it behooves
us to briefly explain it. It is a basic
idea in Nietzsche, one where Fate rules endlessly in a sort of Greek, cyclical,
and endlessly tragic view of history.
But instead of despairing at this, Nietzsche had a sort of “mystical
vision,” mid way through his life that one becomes joyful and powerful
precisely by accepting what Fate was going to bring about anyway. This “amor fati”
Carried [Nietzsche] away passively
in an immense and desperate rotation, or on the other hand, [allows him] to
participate in the dominating force that thus moves the cosmos…he can suffer
the iron law of universal determinism, but he can, on the other hand, be
himself this very law in freedom. In the
first case, he is destroyed, in the second, he triumphs. There is no emptiness more horrible nor any
plenitude more overflowing.[18]
Far
from being a complete system, de Lubac notes how this contradicts the concept
of the Overman, the creator of values: “thus, in Nietzsche, whose initial word
was No to the God, the absolute has nevertheless now gained acceptance, albeit
in a downright tragically distorted form.
It turned out that the pure negativity [of God’s death] was an impossible
dream. Even the Overman could not build
himself in an absolute void.”[19]
Conclusion
As
always, there is much more to be said, but which we do not now have the room to
explore. De Lubac is a powerful thinker who has much to offer, but by way of
intellectual rigor and spiritual richness.
While we only touched a few themes—and even in those few themes a
further isolation of sub themes was necessary to limit scope—but it has
hopefully been shown that anyone who reads de Lubac will be enriched. He is the perfect example of how the richness
of Christian thought and tradition are the echoes of God who is the very vital
impulse in our daily life. Reading de
Lubac allows one’s eyes to be opened somewhat, to see how God affects the whole
world, it is just so often that we do not care, or were not watching.
[1] De Lubac, At the
Service of the Church, 324.
[2] De Lubac, Drama
of Atheist Humanism, 67.
[4] Henri de Lubac, The
Discovery of God, 82.
[5] De Lubac, The
Discovery of God, 10.
[8] De Lubac, The
Drama of Atheist Humanism, 58n.123.
[10] De Lubac, The
Mystery of the Supernatural, 232-233.
[11] Voderholzer, Meet
Henri De Lubac, 124.
[12] De Lubac, The
Discovery of God, 193.
[15] De Lubac, The
Drama of Atheist Humanism, 67.
[16] De Lubac, The
Discovery of God, 182.
[17] De Lubac, The
Drama of Atheist Humanism, 67.
[18] De Lubac, The
Drama of Atheist Humanism, 484.
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