A Trauma of Silence: The Life and Works of Henri De Lubac (Part Two)
A Life of Theology, A Theological Life
Never…have
I found anyone with such a comprehensive theological and humanistic education
as von Balthasar and de Lubac, and I cannot even begin to say how much I owe my
encounter with them.
It is often said
that academic and religious vocations require one to retreat from politics and
“real life,” but as Grumett puts it “the story of de Lubac’s own early life
refutes this assertion comprehensively.”[2] In fact as a Jesuit, de Lubac was a member of
a religious order subject to sustained persecution by the French state. The Waldeck-Rousseu measure introduced to
France on the first of July, 1901—with only the shallowest pretentions to even
feign an upholding of liberty—affirmed the right of lay associations to convene
but only under the stipulation that they register themselves; failure to do so
could result in serious fines and even imprisonment.
As part of a
second blow, in 1904 the Combes measure imposed a universal ban on teaching by
clergy members, effectively preventing the formation and education of clergy anywhere
within the borders of France. This
hostility is perhaps difficult for the American mind to fathom, but such was
the tumultuous reality of turn of the century France that no less than thirty-seven
religious colleges were dissolved in an instant, “and twenty thousand religious
were expelled from France, expulsions that occasioned popular protest
demonstrations, for instance in Lyons and Nantes,” where such forced religious
exoduses were overshadowed only by the fatalities accrued at their protest.[3] As a result of these measures de Lubac, as so
many other Jesuits with him, was forced in the journey of his education to
eventually head to England and continue training. Before this, however, de
Lubac was conscripted into the French Military for the First World War in
1914. Unlike American exceptions to
religious “conscientious objectors,” France made no distinction between laity
and clergy regarding military recruitment eligibility. So from 1915 to 1917, De Lubac was stationed
at the Third Military Regiment at Antibes.
On All-Saints Day in 1917, he suffered a serious head-wound, and it was
not until 1956 that he had the shrapnel removed.
In fact, like most
in that era, De Lubac’s work always took place amidst wars and rumors of
wars. And this warfare was of various
kinds. In 1942 when the Germans invaded,
de Lubac recalls “the tension was constant.
We lived in a fever increased by hunger, by the daily horror of the
news, by the next day’s uncertainty. And
yet, work was carried on, becoming even more intense.”[4] Following many of the Church Fathers like
Saint Augustine, and Peter in his first Epistle, de Lubac saw the rise of
Nazism as a fundamentally spiritual problem; and much like Barth in Germany de
Lubac, though not winning many supporters amongst the Vichy regime, constantly
warred against what he saw (with aghast) as many clergy using “naively
supernatural” language to justify their collusion with the Nazi genocide.[5] In a letter to his superiors in April, 1941
de Lubac protested vehemently that
The anti-Semitism of today was
unknown to our fathers; besides its degrading effect on those who abandon
themselves to it, it is anti-Christian.
It is against the Bible, against the Gospel as well as the Old
Testament, against the universalism of the church, against what is called the
‘Roman International’;…It is all the more important to be on our guard, for
this anti-Semitism is already gaining ground among the Catholic elite, even in
our religious houses. There we have a
danger that is only too real.[6]
Immediately
following this letter de Lubac along with three other colleagues convened under
the direction of Joseph Chaine to compose the “Draft of the Declaration of the
Catholic Theology Faculty at Lyons,” which was in its essence a statement that
Catholics may only practice their religion freely if they fight for others (in
this case the Jews) to have the same rights to existence; this eventually came
to be recognized under the name the “Chaine Declaration,” though unlike the
“Barmen Declaration” composed in Germany under the lead of Barth and Bonhoeffer,
the Chaine Declaration ran into conservative resistance at the top of the
Catholic hierarchy from one Cardinal Gerlier, who judged it unwise to
publish. Nonetheless De Lubac persuaded
Gerlier to allow “anonymous and clandestine” circulation.[7] Such undercover distribution set the model
for the underground journal Cahiers du
témoignage chretien, principally founded by de Lubac, which quickly became
one of the only reliable sources to disseminate printed information in France
at the time. The Cahiers contained details of spiritual resistance to Nazism, and
though Catholic in origin included generous excerpts from Barth’s riveting
lambasts of the Nazi party.[8]
Despite
the fact that de Lubac frequently drew back from those who requested he take a
more overt and directly political stance (de Lubac was insistent on maintaining
the Christian and spiritual character of his resistance, so as to not, so to
speak, play the same game as the Nazis) the Gestapo did not seem to appreciate
such fine theological distinctions, and set out to find De Lubac so as to
silence him. He had to flee the country on at least two occasions. But in his satchel as he tactically retreated
from one war, in the form of manuscripts which would eventually become
published as a book entitled Surnaturel,[9] he
carried the stirrings of a different sort of war with him.
The “Supernatural” Controversy.
The
affirmation of God rises up from the very roots of being and thought, before
all conscious acts, before the formation of concepts, conferring upon
consciousness its guarantee and upon its concept its universal validity. Shrouded and secret, though necessary and
permanent [God] lies at the basis of all our judgments about being.
The
working of reason which carries us to Him—not to Him so much as to the
threshold of his mystery—is never but the second wave of the rhythm which He Himself
has set in motion.
What came to be
called the “supernatural controversy” may seem to many—especially in our era
and its manifest impatience with metaphysics—to be an academic debate without
difference. With the same bewilderment
leveled at the filioque—pondering
exactly how such an unassuming epigram could be so freighted with technicality
as to split the church into two cardinal directions—perhaps today’s largely
anti-metaphysical pew sitter may wonder at how the phrase “no pure nature,”
sounded the klaxons of the Catholic neo-scholastic vanguard. Yet we must also immediately point out that
“it is vital to grasp de Lubac’s…political
opponents—Catholic Rightists supporting the Vichy regime and collaborating
with the occupying Germans—were also [his] theological
opponents.”[12] Milbank perhaps paints such connections too
strongly—at times implying that the neo-Scholastic Catholic right-wing’s
theology (that opposed de Lubac) necessarily led to collaboration with the
Germans. But what is undeniable from the
vantage of this side of history is that Milbank is certainly correct in noting,
if nothing else, the factual correlation between such theologies and such
politics.[13]
After the German
invasion in 1940, a line of demarcation was drawn so that the northern portion
of France—the so called “free zone”—remained unoccupied, and so having fled, de
Lubac went to Lyons where he taught during the 1941-42 school year. In 1943 however, the German’s transgressed
the free-zone line, and de Lubac again had to flee because the Gestapo were
searching for him.[14] He fled to a religious house in Vals (just
south of Lyon) and during his time of hiding and seclusion, de Lubac took
advantage of the academic resources at Val to complete Surnaturel. But before we get into some of the details of de
Lubac’s claim, some of the background in Catholic theology which served as
tinder for the coming fire must be examined.
In 1879 Pope Leo
XIII published the encyclical Aeterni
Patris in order to recommend that Catholics worldwide reform their
teaching, and just as importantly their apologetics, along the lines of Thomas
Aquinas. The impetus behind this was to
provide the Catholic church with a united intellectual front against
“Modernist” atrophy (e.g. higher-criticism, Hegelianism, and a variety of other
perceived acids). Official efforts to
establish a codified schema of “Thomism” began, and through nearly four decades
of increased systematization in 1914 the Sacred Congregation of Studies
published the “Twenty-Four Theses” or a set of propositions summarizing the
“central tenets of orthodoxy to be taught in all colleges as fundamental
elements of philosophy.”[15] While this neo-Thomist effort initially had
the desired effect of intellectual bulwark, its presence in another sense won
only a pyrrhic victory. The almost manic
codification that had occurred in the forty years following Aeterni patris undoubtedly provided
powerful intellectual insight, but it also ossified the richness of the
faith. One of the effects of the
“Twenty-Four Theses” and the general neo-scholastic atmosphere surrounding them,
was that investigation of thinkers, present and past, were often little more
than a measuring game, determining how much or how little a thinker conformed
or not to the already established criteria of
the theses.[16] It was often the case that primary sources
were no longer even read, but were approached only through the apparatus of the
neo-Thomistic theology manual.
Such “manual
Thomism” quickly became despised by the younger generation of intellectuals who
had grown up saturated by it. In fact in
one sense the generation of theologians who were most influential in Vatican II
and in 20th century Catholic theology were those determined to break
out of such neo-Thomistic chains. These
include not just Henri de Lubac, but Yves Congar, Jean Danielou, Hans Urs Von
Balthasar, Hans Kung, and Karl Rahner, among others. Each felt intellectually starved by the
myopia resultant from the exhortations of the well-intention Aeterni patris. A particularly amusing anecdote from this
period has von Balthasar sitting in the back of his professor’s lecture hall,
ears stuffed with cotton as he read the works of Augustine and ignored the
lecture;[17]
while another paints de Lubac in an almost cloak-and-dagger scenario of clandestine
meetings with some of his own mentors, who encouraged him to see if the various
“Thomistic schools” were even true to St. Thomas, let along the whole
tradition.[18]
In essence, with Surnatural, de Lubac wanted to challenge
the intellectual historiography of Aeterni
patris, and thereby move beyond the entrapment of the neo-Scholastic
paradigm.[19] This, it should be mentioned, was not a movement
against Aquinas himself, merely what 16th and 19th/20th
century theologians had done to him. De
Lubac comments: “I do not regard the ‘common Doctor’ as an ‘exclusive Doctor’
who dispenses us from the task of familiarizing ourselves with the others; and
I deem it regrettable that a certain partiality, inspired by a misguided
strictness and artificial controversies, should sometimes have obscured the
sense of a profound unity which exists among the great masters.”[20]
Perhaps odd at
first glance, de Lubac’s critique of modern theology became a quest in Surnaturel for “the origins of the
concept of nature, especially human nature, as complete in itself, and not
dependent for its preservation,” on the immediate presence and action of God.[21] De Lubac notes “the fact that ‘pure nature’
in the modern sense of the word is something not considered at all in eastern
[Christian] theology is explained by the fact that the early Greek tradition
contained no such idea…nor, I believe, was it contained in the Latin tradition
until a very late date.”[22] While we will see exactly what the term “pure
nature” is all about, and how exactly it relates to the neo-Scholasticism de
Lubac and his classmates were so weary of, its importance must be immediately stated: “while wishing to protect
the supernatural from any contamination, people had in fact exiled it
altogether—both from intellectual and social life.”[23]
With this quote we
get in essence a basic feel for the contours of De Lubac’s project. Very similar in outline (if different in
detail) to what thinkers like Francis Schaeffer, Herman Dooyeweerd, or Wolfhart
Pannenberg do, de Lubac is adamant that the only pathway to a solution for
modern malaise is through a genealogical analysis of how bad theology has
separated (or improperly combined) God and world (and so separated reason and
faith, theology and life, etc…). Whereas
Schaefer speaks of the “line of despair,” that led to modern man to abandon the
quest for rational knowledge and settle for an irrational faith of one sort or
another, de Lubac wants to speak of the evolution of thought where man came to
be seen as “naturally” complete in himself: “the story is a dramatic one; at
its maximum point of concentration, it is the great crisis of modern times.”[24] Or, to put it in terms more familiar to us
(though we must be careful not to caricature his intentions), de Lubac is
interested in the logic of secularization—the cordoning off of the world from
God pieces at a time, to see the world as operating by a self-sufficient logic
and ontology. After this has been done,
the so-called “disproofs” of God are a mere formality because our entire
orientation to the world became functionally atheistic:
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…[25]
As we shall see
this was not based in some pre-modern “humanistic” or even atheistic principle,
but rather is rooted in a series of theological problematics that haunted
church discourse in the Medieval and Reformation eras. And though it did not begin from atheism, de
Lubac sees it providing the scaffolding:
If we look down the course of the
ages to the dawn of modern times we make a strange discovery. That same Christian idea of man that had been
welcomed as a deliverance was now beginning to be felt as a yoke. And that same God in whom man had learned to
see the seal of his own greatness began to seem to him like an antagonist, the
enemy of his dignity…This atheist humanism is not to be confused with a
hedonist and coarsely materialist atheism…It does not profess to be the simple
answer to a speculative problem and certainly not a purely negative solution:
as if the understanding, having, on the attainment of maturity, set itself to
‘reconsider’ the problem of God, had at last been obliged to see that its
efforts could lead to nothing or even that they were leading to an end that was
the opposite of what they had long believed…The problem posed was a human
problem—it was the human problem—and
the solution that is being given to it is one that claims to be positive. Man is getting rid of God in order to regain
possession of the human greatness that, it seems to him, is being unwarrantably
withheld by another. In God he is
overthrowing an obstacle to gain his freedom.[26]
[1] Quoted in Voderholzer, Meet Henri De Lubac, 7.
[2] Grumett, De
Lubac, 26.
[3] Voderholzer, Meet
Henri De Lubac, 29-30.
[4] De Lubac, At the
Service of the Church, 50.
[5] Grumett, De
Lubac, 39.
[6] Quoted in Ibid.,
39.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Roughly equivalent to the English word
“supernatural.” Interestingly enough Surnaturel has yet to be fully
translated into English.
[11] De Lubac, The
Discovery of God, 10.
[12] Milbank, The
Suspended Middle, 3.
[13] Thus we tend to agree with Voderholzer’s more measured
approach: “We can surmise political motives played a part too,…since it is
possible to connect the dots between the Vichy government and the rejection of la nouvelle theologie.” (Meet Henri de Lubac 66-67).
[14] Voderholzer, Meet
Henri de Lubac, 56-57.
[15] Grumett, De
Lubac, 7.
[17] Rodney Howsare, Von
Balthasar: A Guide For the Perplexed (New York: T&T Clark, 2009), 4.
[18] Voderholzer, Meet
Henri de Lubac, 41.
[19] Grummet, De
Lubac, 8.
[20] De Lubac, Discovery
of God, 205.
[21] Grummt, De Lubac,
9.
[22] Henri De Lubac, The
Mystery of the Supernatural (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 1998), 5.
[25] Henri de Lubac, The
Discovery of God, 82.
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