A Trauma of SIlence: The Life and Works of Henri De Lubac
The
whole world is a shadow, a way, the trace of a footprint, and is a book that is
written from the outside. For in each
and every creature there is a gleam of the divine exemplar, even though this
gleam is thoroughly intermingled with darkness.
Wherefore it is just like a patch of shade, as it were, mixed with
light.
--St.
Bonaventure, In Hexameron, collatio
13, n.14
All
nature is an infinitely vast and diverse symbol across which the face of God is
mysteriously reflected. A man is
religious to the very degree that he recognizes everywhere the reflections of
the divine Face, that is [he recognizes] he lives in a sacred atmosphere.
I
raise my mind to God as I breathe; in each case by virtue of the same necessity
Henri
de Lubac is a man marked by paradox; it is not only that “his thought pattern
is the paradox,”[3]
but such is even the very configuration of his life. He is a Frenchman who was schooled in
England; a Patristic and Medieval specialist accused of inventing a “new
theology”; a broadly conservative theologian who wrote two books extolling many
aspects of the work of his liberal friend, Teilhard de Chardin; made a Cardinal
sometime after suffering an eight-year silence imposed by the Catholic
magisterium; a man of unshakeable devotion to the Catholic church, who
nonetheless recalled that during his Jesuit education he would scribble “rather
nonconformist notes;”[4] a
man who fled from the Gestapo and S.S. clutching to his chest as he ran—not
sensitive documents or intelligence reports—but a manuscript on the history of
theology. Above all, de Lubac was a man
who knew the only way forward into the future was a circumspect road, one retrieving
the richness of the past.[5]
Born
in 1896, most of de Lubac’s adult life[6]
occurred in what Eric Hobsbawm has called “the short twentieth-century,”
spanning from the end of the second World War up until the Soviet Union
collapsed in 1991, also the year de Lubac died.[7] Though perhaps not embodying the extremity of
Bonhoeffer’s martyrdom, de Lubac’s life and theology evoke a peculiar
fascination precisely in how often they intertwine—as Avery Cardinal Dulles put
it, De Lubac’s theological career was “a stormy one.”[8] Thus it is a shame that de Lubac is still
relatively unknown to the English-speaking world. In fact Grumett in his introductory work on
De Lubac published in 2007, notes surprise that his is in fact the first work
in English on the French theologian.[9] Previously von Balthasar had written a German
introduction, now translated as The
Theology of Henri de Lubac,[10]
and since Grumett a few other studies have come forward.[11] Without pretending to be able to even
approximate a full fledged picture of de Lubac’s work, this essay in its own
small way aims to contribute to knowledge of de Lubac’s corpus by way of a
brief biography, and taking a look at themes developed in his “trilogy”—The Drama of Atheist Humanism, The Discovery
of God, and The Mystery of the
Supernatural.
[1] Quoted in Bryan C. Hollon, Everything is Sacred: The Spiritual Exegesis in the Political Theology
of Henri De Lubac (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2009), 3.
[2] Henri de Lubac, The
Discovery of God (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing, 1996), 41.
[3] Max Seckler, quoted in Rudolf Voderholzer, Meet Henri de Lubac: His Life and Work (SanFrancisco:
Ignatius Press, 2008), 117.
[4] Henri de Lubac, At
the Service of the Church: Henri de Lubac Reflects on the Circumstances that
Occasioned His Writings trans. Anne Englund Nash (SanFrancisco: Ignatius,
1988), 42.
[5] De Lubac, At The
Service of the Church 317-318: “Every time, in the West, that Christian
renewal has flourished, in the order of thought as that of life…it has
flourished under the sign of the Fathers.”
[6] For an autobiographical review, c.f. de Lubac, At the Service of the Church; for a
general biographical overview see: Voderholzer, Meet Henri de Lubac, 19-107.
[7] David Grumett, De
Lubac: A Guide for the Perplexed (New York: T&T Clark, 2007), 5.
[8] Avery Cardinal Dulles, foreword to Grumett, A Guide for the Perplexed, ix.
[10] Hans Urs Von Balthazar, The Theology of Henri de Lubac: An Overview trans. Joseph D.
Fessio, S.J., (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991).
[11] In addition to the already mentioned Voderholzer
(translated from a prior German edition) a short but notable introduction to a
few of de Lubac’s theological themes is John Milbank, The Suspended Middle: Henri de Lubac and the Debate Concerning the
Supernatural (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing, 2005).
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