Communio系列讲座: 第一场（内容）
The Theology of Henri de Lubac
by Dr. Thomas Joseph White
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I’m going to talk first about the history of his life, and then I’m going to talk about his method or way of doing theology, literary, and historical sensibility. Last, I will talk about some main themes and ideas and then his legacy. Henri de Lubac (1896-1991) lived through the First World War, the Second World War, the rise of the Soviet Union, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Second Vatican Council, the pontificate of John Paul II (most of it). So his life spans a huge range of historical changes and social changes in Europe, in the Catholic church, and in the world.
He was born into a French aristocratic family, given a Jesuit education, and he was 1 of 6 children. He entered the Society of Jesus when he was 17. At the time he entered in 1913, the French government was strictly anti-clerical. The Jesuits were exiled from France, so he went to England for his intellectual training. He was educated for much of his training by Jesuits in England: French Jesuits living in England. He was taught by a traditional scholastic kind of theology based out of the 17th century important Spanish Jesuit thinker Francisco Suarez, which is a kind of Jesuit interpretation of Thomas Aquinas. It was, in a way, non-historical, but very philosophical, didactic, logical, syllogistic, using definitions, propositions, and arguments. He did not enjoy this formation.
He at the beginning started reading a modern philosopher from France named Maurice Blondel. Blondel was a layman who wrote a very important work in 1893, 20 years before de Lubac entered the jesuits, called L’Action. It was a book much more of a modern philosophical approach to human search for transcendence, the human beings, the modern human being seeking something that will make them happy, open to the transcendent mystery of God through the inner search for happiness and freedom, and the inner search to find rest for one’s desires. So this modern subjectivity of Blondel looking for God through human freedom, desire, and subjectivity, was very appealing to de Lubac.
The French government forced the Jesuits, Dominicans, and other religious to enter war in 1915 and fight the Germans. The clerics and priests had to enter into the military because it was a secular government. No exception and no special privilege. De Lubac was in the First World War and was wounded by a bullet to his head in 1917. It did not kill him but give him a concussion. He was very affected by it. It took a year to recover. During this time in 1917-1918, he read extensively the works of the ancient Fathers of the Church, which had been published by a French Benedictine J. P. Migne who was a 19th century Benedictine and who published all the works of the Fathers in Greek and Latin. De Lubac read Greek and Latin like you and I read the newspaper. So He just read and read the Fathers of the Church for years. Then he began to really integrate that and to be a reader of the Patristics from the 1st century to the 12th century.
He was assigned to teach theology in Leon, France, in the 1930s, as a young professor. He began to live in a little Jesuit house with people like Jean Danielou and eventually von Balthasar, and a whole host of other famous scholars who began to write books on the importance of the Church Fathers. Now his first major work and period, 1938 to 1950, these Jesuits are assembling a new school of theology, which will be called La Nouvelle Theologie (the New Theology). They’re trying to do something non-scholastic, more historical, based on the studies of the Fathers. But it’s not merely historical because they also want to show how old ancient ideas help us understand the world today. So they call it Ressourcement theology. You go back to the Fathers and you show why it’s meaningful today. And it became the most dominant movement in 20th century Catholic theology.
So the first great work is 1938, Catholicism on the social nature of the Church. What de Lubac is doing there is reacting in the modern era to, on the one hand, the rise of National Socialism in Germany, and on the other hand, the rise of atheist Marxism, especially in Russia, and he’s trying to present an idea of Christianity as having a social identity for the human person. But on a deeper level, you might say that he’s talking inside the Catholic Church about a notion of Christian identity that is collective or social. He wants to accentuate or emphasize that salvation is not simply individual; salvation is collective. The human person is a political animal. Salvation occurs in a communion of persons and in a collection of persons. He goes through and emphasizes this collective identity of the human being through dogma, sacraments, the Eucharist, and images of the Church.
In 1940, two years later, he found Sources Chrétiennes with Jean Danielou. This is a sourcebook of different patristic authors, the Fathers of the Church, translated into French. So the idea here is to make the fathers accessible to ordinary people in the French Church. They want to publish spiritual writing, mystical writing, not just scholastic argument. So they want something more symbolic or intuitive, more spiritual, less rational, and less argumentative.
He then publishes in 1944 Corpus Mysticum and the Drama of Atheist Humanism. Corpus Mysticum is a book about the the Mass and the Eucharist. It’s about the whole idea that in some ways the Eucharist makes the Church and the Church is a mystical body of Christ. It comes about because of the Eucharist. So it’s an idea that the Mass or the Eucharist celebration creates a collective life of the Church and then the Drama of Atheist Humanism. He engages especially with Friedrich Nietzsche, Auguste Comte, and Feuerbach and presents Sources Chrétiennes as a modern resource to speak to atheism.
In 1945, he presents this most important book, this is the most controversial and important book he wrote, Surnaturel. This is a re-interpretation of Thomas Aquinas. What he argues here is that the Scholastics of modern period have understood Aquinas wrong on the relationship of nature and grace. We have a natural desire, each of us has a natural desire for the supernatural, and a natural desire as human beings for life with the Trinity. Our nature as human beings cannot be understood unless we have the Christian revelation. In a certain way, the Christian revelation is the key and the secret unlocking the mystery of the human condition. This was a very controversial work because he argued that in a way, you can use the historical-critical method to reinterpret Thomas Aquinas over against the modern scholastic Thomists, Jesuit, and Dominicans.
In 1950, there’s a reaction. So there’s a reaction against de Lubac and Jean Danielou, both from the Jesuits, Dominicans, and others who want to defense Classicism. This leads to arguments and polemics. In 1950, Pope Pius XII and others were worried that the Nouvelle Theologie was becoming rebellious against the traditional scholastic theology that was put in place in part by Pius X in 1920s. Pius XII had an active authoritarian intervention and asked them to stop and delay the teaching. It was a kind of a punishment but a punishment not like a red light, not a green light, but a yellow light, slowing you down. As a result of that, de Lubac was not allowed to teach from 1950 to 1958.
But during this time, he kept working and wrote actually first a book in devotion to the Church. So he was under obedience and having to live through a difficult time. He wrote this book, which was called Meditation sur l’Église (The Splendor of the Church) and a mystical book about the mystery of the Church, even though he has to perform a hard act of obedience. At this time he also wrote a very important four-volumes work on spiritual exegesis in the Middle Ages: the Four Senses of Scripture. Scripture can be read literally, morally, typologically, and anagogically or eschatologically, pointing toward the end of the world. Massive study of medieval interpretation of the Bible. I’ll talk about why in a minute.
In 1960, he got rehabilitated by Pope John XXIII. Pius XII had been critical and skeptical of de Lubac, but John XXIII was very positive and brought him into the Second Vatican Council, not as a bishop but as a theological adviser to the bishops. In the Second Vatican Council, he worked very closely with a young polish bishop whose name was Karol Wojtyła (will become John Paul II). So during this time, he had a large effect on the Second Vatican Council document Gaudium et Spes (On the Church in the Modern World). After the council, Pope Paul VI, the next Pope, put him on the International Theological Commission, which is a body of theologians who advises the Church. The head of the Commission now is a theologian who lives next door to me right there. De Lubac used to be the head of the Commission.
He was a close friend and co-worker of Hans urs von Balthasar and Joseph Ratzinger who became the next Pope after John Paul II. He was very close to John Paul II and Benedict XVI. He was very good friend with von Balthasar. Together, von Balthasar, Ratzinger, Danielou, and de Lubac founded a journal in the 1970s called Communio, which became a Communio school and which this lecture series is named after. De Lubac, von Balthasar, and Ratzinger are seen as the fathers of this movement. In the life of the French Church, the European Church, after the Second Vatican Council, there was a lot of debate, confusion, extreme progressivism, and extreme liberalism.
In this context, de Lubac who had suffered under Pius XII. Pius XII was conservative and thought de Lubac was going too far. Now de Lubac was a conservative who criticized a lot of liberal theologians in the 1980s. He wrote a very important and large work that’s not translated in English: La postérité spirituelle de Joachim de Flore, 900 pages, on his theology of history. He was basically criticizing the utopian progressivism and a lot of contemporary Catholic theology. He finishes his life closely collaborating with popes in the Communio movement, critical of a lot of the most progressive theology after the council.
So let me just talk a little bit about some of his method. When you read de Lubac, the best book to read first is Catholicism. When you read that book, look at how it’s divided. It’s like a series of themes. It’s very intuitive. It’s like a series of meditations notes putting together. There are a lot of footnotes to the Fathers of the Church, medieval authors, and modern spiritual writers in these notes. It’s helpful to think about how de Lubac studied and wrote. He had multiple volumes on his desk, little cards, and quotation marks with references. He put them on his desk one after the other. He kept packets of notes of different themes from the Fathers.
When he goes to write his book, he writes five pages on this theme and puts in ideas from these notes. He has a general idea: the social nature of Christianity, then he goes and takes historical quotation marks and integrates them into small sections. He puts the sections together and creates a vast meditation. It’s a little like a piece of Mozart or Bach’s music. You have one theme and goes to another them. You put these scenes together, get a symphony, and set up a collection of intuitions with many historical citations. It’s not an argument with definitions, alternative positions, refutations, logical disputations, demonstrations, and proofs. He does not work that way. It’s a set of vision. He gives you a vision with intuition and historical references. It’s spiritual, historical, and intellectual.
What is he typically doing in terms of his aims? De Lubac takes problems and identifies them with what we have today. Instead of going directly into the problems, he goes around into another topic to come back to them. Taking a famous example, one problem today in the modern era is how to interpret the Bible in light of modern historical-critical scholarship and face questions like did Jesus really exist? Did David really exist? Who was Jesus? De Lubac does not going directly to these historical Jesus problems. He goes to medieval exegesis and talks about different senses of Scripture. He is inviting us to think about the Bible as a book that’s written to do more than to communicate only historical truth.
Yes, de Lubac believes in the historical Jesus. He believes the Incarnation that Jesus was God and his bodily resurrection. But he does not believe that we simply study Scripture as a factual book of history or a book of doctrine. It’s also a book of symbols, of spiritual life, of moral teaching. It’s a book of the church. In a way, he is trying to go back around the question and say, maybe we are approaching the whole problem too narrowly. Yes, historical exegesis matters. But we also need to think about the spiritual senses and the larger conversation. It’s a way of responding to skeptics like Rudolf Bultmann about the New Testament but doing it in a different way.
Similarly, in the Drama of Atheist Humanism, he doesn’t want to simply give arguments for the existence of God. He did write a book about the knowledge of God in 1945. But he wants to look at atheism in modern Europe historically and how it was unfolded. Look at how Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard in their responses to it. We need to study the history of atheism and not simply to refute it by arguments. We need to understand it genealogically and how it unfolds in history. In a way, de Lubac is saying that we need to be better historians of thought, not simply to have arguments but also know the intellectual history as it unfolds.
To give you some examples of what he was trying to do in the later period during the council when he was back in favor. He republished the controversial book Surnaturel and published it now as two volumes: a historical part Augustinianism and Modern Theology, which is basically the same as the first half of Surnaturel. He published the second part the Mystery of the Supernatural. This is his later view of nature and grace where he takes into account of criticisms and tries to find a consensus position. Many scholars now think that this is the most important work on nature and grace in the 20th century. I do not share that position. I am critical of the book.
But everyone reacts to the book. I actually also think Hans Urs von Balthasar’s book about Karl Barth is a more important Catholic book about nature and grace. Von Balthasaar was close to de Lubac but somewhat different. Other people think Karl Rahner as the most important theologian of nature and grace. The three have different positions. I hold another view, which is that of Aquinas. But it’s an interesting dispute. You can see he’s trying to do a study of Thomas Aquinas and you might call it the historical-critical study of him. Rather than treating the scholastic authors as the source of arguments, he treats them in historical context. This has had lasting effect on the study of Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure, and the other great medieval doctors. Now most people study them historically, which is an inspiration from de Lubac. Whether they agree with de Lubac’s own interpretation, this is a secondary issue. The method of studying historically has become very popular.
In the last part of his life after the council, the Church in France became very secular and skeptical. It was a huge interior crisis of faith and theological conviction. De Lubac began to write in defense of Catholicism for Catholics. You have many Christians who are becoming secular and abandoning the faith. De Lubac in the last part of his life from the 1970s to 80s wrote another little book on grace and nature: Brief Catechesis on Nature and Grace, another argument for why grace matters. Here he engages a little bit more with them, and he is somewhat critical of liberal Dominicans like Chenu and Schillebeeckx who wanted a Church that was more secular. De Lubac argues against their view of assimilation to the secular European order.
And he wrote this little book Paradoxes of Faith, simply defending the reasonableness of faith, and the idea that you can believe in God in the modern world and most importantly, as I have mentioned. He wrote a massive book on Joachim of Flore who was a cistercian monk from the 11th century. Joachim argued that we currently live in the age of Christ. But in the future, there will be an age of the Holy Spirit that will come into the world, and we will leave behind the institutional Church and enter into a purely spiritual Church, a Church is without institutions and purely spiritual. De Lubac argues that there’s a long history of the idea in later Christianity but also in the secular European political thought.
He argues that a lot of modern European political thoughts are utopian that want to bring the world into a perfect age of the Spirit. However, it is the human spirit rather than the Holy Spirit. He sees it as a secular version and repetition of a theological idea. He thinks that it is a bad idea (laugh) because it’s too unrealistic about human nature and the need for the Church. He is defending the institutional Church and the necessity of the institutional Church. It is written in some ways against the extreme liberalism of the Jesuits he is living with in Paris in the 1970s. He is seeing many Jesuits leaving the priesthood and teaching very strange ideas. He is defending the tradition. The idea that the Church, institutions, dogmas, and liturgy endure forever. We don’t ever go beyond. It’s a polemical work. But again, he doesn’t just write the polemics. He goes back to the old history. A strange idea from the past. He tries to argue that it is very important for us today, typical of de Lubac. He never goes directly in. He always goes around.
A last couple of words about key themes and legacy. I view de Lubac’s primary theme as theological anthropology, meaning what is a human person. Human persons are made in the image of God in view of the likeness of God through grace. We are unable as spiritual beings to be satisfied or fulfilled unless we are living in the grace of Christ. In other words, the human being is a puzzle, a problem, an enigma, and a question. We do not understand what we are fully. We cannot understand what we are fully unless we discover grace. We understand why we have minds and hearts, intellect and will open to the absolute, and open to God. We are made for communion with God and communion with other people. We are social. We made in the image of God and social in our imaging of God. We are made for life in the Church.
Second, for de Lubac, when we do not have the life of the Church, what do we do? I think he sees modern secular European politics, the political life of modern France in the secular era of the 20th century, as a sort of imitation of the Church, an attempts to create a corporate body, a communion through politics, but not through religion. He is not just reacting against it. He thinks it’s something natural but that can be elevated by the Church and by religion. We are corporate and political animals, but we need a political life open to God. I think that’s a very big concern of his in France in the 20th century.
The third key idea is the past illuminates the future. When we feel trapped, when we feel intellectually trapped and we cannot go forward, we don’t know what to believe and where to go. The past teaches us how to find a living future. We don’t just repeat the past. De Lubac didn’t like the scholastics. He thought they were repeating the past. Instead of repeating the past, we can go back and recover the past and presented it newly and creatively. This is an idea he communicated to von Balthasar and Ratzinger. Ratzinger is especially a master theologian of going back to the past and presenting ideas from the past for the present. I think Ratzinger is better at it than de Lubac. Ratzinger was a younger generation. He took de Lubac’s ideas and went further. Von Balthasar has his own way and more of a modern German system.
Today, de Lubac’s champions are in the Communio school. He has a kind of friendship of thought with von Balthasar and Ratzinger. Most people who study de Lubac seriously study Ratzinger and von Balthasar. Some people feel closer to one than the other. But they talk to each other intellectually. I don’t mean they just talk. I mean they speak to each other intellectually and spiritually. Among those who are not in the Communio school, however, de Lubac is still influential. Even people who don’t agree with everything de Lubac argues have been changed by his way of doing theology.
Disciples of Thomas Aquinas today often read him in historical context. As a medieval theologian, they look at how does Thomas Aquinas interpret Scripture and how does Thomas aquinas interpret the Fathers. De Lubac received the Fathers today. How did Aquinas receive the Fathers in his day? There are interesting questions there. Also, there have been significant challenges to de Lubac’s interpretation. A famous book I should mention to you, recently, Lawrence Feingold, an American convert to Catholicism. He was Jewish. He became a Catholic. He wrote this book the Natural Desire to See God According to St. Thomas and His Interpreters. He has written a very respectful critique of de Lubac. It’s a very long book. This book has a lot of effect. There is an ongoing debate.
Clearly, I would say there are critical concerns. One is, if we do theology historically, who chooses what is important in history. In other words, some people worry that the historical method is arbitrary. I decide this is important. You decide that is important (laugh). But how do we decide things we are going to focus on collectively if we want to teach theology and philosophy in a coherent way across the Church. After all, history is vast, history is huge, and history is disputed. Even de Lubac’s histories are now often disputed. Can we really get a unified body of truth from historical theology? Some people worry it makes theology relativistic because you like Patristics, I like scholastics, he likes modern German theology, and she likes modern Italian theology.
So we all have different historical specializations. But how do we account for common doctrine and dogma? Some people worry that it is antiquarian. It goes to the past. But do we study modern science? Do we look at modern debates from science? Arguments against belief in God from people who are modern philosophers and scientists. Or contemporary biblical exegesis, how do we engage that? Does de Lubac help us? So I raise some arguments. But, to finish, I would just say de Lubac was the greatest and most influential French theologian of the 20th century. This is uncontroversial. He was one of the greatest Catholic theologians of the 20th century. So he has a massive importance. Everyone who studies modern theology has to read de Lubac. So that’s the summary of my talk.
Communio系列讲座 第一场（问答环节)
Question 1: Does this source theology has something to do, especially research principles, with the source criticism in biblical scholarship?
Answer 1: …………And they don’t really talk to each other very much. Now it’s not a Jesuit problem. It’s a Christian intellectual problem. Because if you emphasize the spiritual senses of Scripture and reading patristics and medieval spiritual authors, you have one set of concerns or emphasis. If you look at modern historical problems, you have another set of concerns. How do we bring these together? This is a major question in theology. I myself try to give an answer to this problem, just a modest limited answer. I’m a very small theologian compared to these people in reality. But I try to give a proposal in my book on Exodus on this historical scholarship of the Exodus event, looking at the historical foundation of Israel and spiritual senses of scripture; looking at the Pentateuch, the Torah, as a historical document and a spiritual document. There are other theologians who work on this. It is an ongoing question or problem. I talked to a Jesuit once who worked at the Biblicum who is a very faithful Jesuit. He said, de Lubac created a problem for us as biblical scholars. Because instead of trying to solve the problem, he changed the subject to another set of issues. We are still left with the theological problems. I’m not telling you that I agree with that. I’m just trying to identify for you where debates are. Von Balthasar and Ratzinger see the issue. Ratzinger wrote the books on Jesus as the Pope in part to show harmony between spiritual reading, theological reading, and the historical-critical reading. Joseph Ratzinger’s books on Jesus are about trying to solve the problem. Balthasar does it a different way in the volume 6 and 7 of his Theological Aesthetics on the Old Testament and the New Testament. It’s a different approach.
Question 2: If Cardinal de Lubac’s thought contains any element of the doctrine of Theosis?
Answer 2: He does not write about Eastern Orthodox theories of divinization. Aquinas has a theology of divinization. Augustine has a theology of divinization. I have not seen any place that de Lubac goes into this. I don’t think he wrote about it in depth. But by looking at the natural desire for God and the question of how the human being can only be happy with God, he writes about something directly connected to the question of divinization or theosis because if we can only be happy with God and by the grace of God, then divinization or union with God by grace is the answer to the problem de Lubac identifies. So he is an important person in conversation with that question. But usually if you work on theosis or divinization, you are working on a conversation between Eastern Orthodox Fathers, the Russian Orthodox Church, for example, and Western Catholic authors like Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure. There is also some work in Lutheranism on divinization that comes out of Finland. The so-called Finnish school, the Finnish school of Lutherans in conversation with the Orthodox Church on divinization. De Lubac did not create that conversation. It was created by the modern ecumenical movement. I don’t know exactly when it really began on the Catholic side. But I think it’s in the 70s and 80s after de Lubac.
Question 3: I had by chance read Cardinal’s Theology in History, and was surprised that Cardinal embraces Trichotomy(the idea of body, soul, and spirit) as the foundation of his anthropology. As my personal observation, those tradition that emphasize the interaction between human being and the Holy Spirit always embrace Trichotomy theory. I wonder if the same phenomenon also occurs to Cardinal de Lubac, or even Catholic tradition? (My observation also show that Catholic tradition embraces both Dichotomy and Trichotomy at the same time.)
Answer 3: Irenaeus of Lyons in the second century says that we are in the image of God and the likeness of God. But the image of God in us is in view or for the likeness of God. So the likeness is a perfecting of the image. The traditional way to understand this is we have the image of God primarily because we have spiritual intellect and will, freewill capacity to love, immaterial knowledge, and immaterial love. Even if we do not have grace, we remain in the image of God. Every human being is in the image of God. Every human being has dignity, nobility, and perfection by being in the image of God. But grace elevates us and moves us to the likeness of God. Now some theologians in the ancient world talk about this movement into the likeness of God as going from just having body and soul to also having spirit where you become spiritual in the Holy Spirit who lives in you. Now, Thomas Aquinas handles this with an Aristotelian distinction of our potency of divinization moving to actual divinization. So we’re in the image of God to move to the likeness of God is to move into faith, hope, and charity, life in the Spirit. The Holy Spirit gives us grace, we go into the Holy Spirit, and we become spiritual. De Lubac is interested in this theme. But I’ll tell you why de Lubac cares about the Trichotomy of body, soul, and spirit. He wants to find a way to think about the human person historically. Modern European intellectual history after Hegel and in the time of Heidegger is obsessed with the historical unfolding of the human person in history. De Lubac is looking for a patristic idea, an idea from the Fathers of the Church to talk about the historical development of the human being and his category. He wants it to be theological but not philosophical. The theological category is body and soul developing in spirit, a spirit in the Holy Spirit in history. And if you look at his essay on the Trichotomy, it’s about how the Fathers and the scholastics think about the human being in a historical way. Other people were doing this like Chenu, studying Thomas Aquinas as a historical theologian. De Lubac studying the Fathers as historical theologians, they want to find a way to talk about history because the secular European intellectuals around them are all obsessed with historical development. They want a Catholic theology of historical development. I think that’s why the trichotomy is so important to de Lubac.
Question 4: A well-known claim of Aquinas is that only God himself can be human beings’ ultimate finis cuius, since only the most perfect divine good can fully satisfy the human rational appetite for bonum in communi. However, on the other hand, Aquinas clearly points out the corresponding finis quo of human beings, i.e., human beings’ possessing God in beatific vision, is beyond any natural capacity and is a purely gratuitous gift of God. Does this eudaemonistic theory imply that human beings have a natural inclination towards a supernatural end (even though nature does not provide us a capacity to realize such a goal)? Or, should we say that there is a natural happiness, distinct from beatific vision, for human beings in an integral natural state?
Answer 4: Yes. Aquinas thinks the human will can only be fulfilled by the sovereign goodness of God as the common good of all the universe and all humanity. And this requires ultimately that human beings possessed the beatific vision, which is beyond our natural capacity, is a purely gratuitous gift of God. The beatific vision is the grace to see God immediately face to face and to possess God in mind and heart in the world to come by grace as a gift. This is what this book (Lawrence Feingold) is about. Do we have a natural inclination to the supernatural? I have an article about this, so I can arrange to send you an article I wrote on this issue. It’s my own argument. I can also send you the argument of a friend of mine. That’s a contract, a different argument, opposed. So you can see two arguments from the contemporary. Feingold shows, Aquinas says clearly we have no natural inclination to the supernatural. If we had natural inclination to the supernatural, we could naturally desire knowledge of the Trinity. We could naturally know Jesus Christ. We would not need faith. We would not need grace, faith, hope, and love. So I think on that point it’s clear there’s no natural inclination to knowledge of the Trinity. However, Aquinas does say we have a natural desire to see God, to know God immediately. My understanding of it is Aquinas thinks it’s a philosophical and natural desire that if you know that God exists, you want to know God. You don’t want to know God only imperfectly. You naturally want to just know God perfectly. So there is a natural desire to see God. Now, Aquinas will argue that in a fallen human nature or in a complex history of the world we live in, many people won’t be aware of that. They won’t think about that. But that in the structure of the human person, we’re capable of natural knowledge of God and natural desire to see God. That I think Aquinas does believe. However, I also think he believes there is a natural end. He says it. He says there is also a natural philosophical end to contemplate God as a philosopher, which he says is imperfect. It provides imperfect happiness. I think personally all these ideas are connected. We have a natural desire to know God. Our knowledge of God is imperfect. It leads to a deeper desire, it’s related to a deeper desire to see God, know God truly. Revelation and grace provide us access to God in himself, perfect knowledge of God, so it speaks to our natural desire for God. I don’t agree with de Lubac on this matter. But de Lubac has made us all debate this much more deeply.
Question 5: Dear Prof. White, I am still reading the book you edited “Analogy of Being”, and I noticed that Prof. Boersma wrote some commendation on the back cover of your book. Here one question comes up to my mind time to time. When we understand analogy of Being as a Denkform/StructurPrincip of Catholic theology which is a discriptive metaphysics to describe the”suspended middle” of transcendental and natural order, is it actually talking the same thing of “sacramental ontology” proposed by Hans Boersma? What are the differences between these two ideas, analogy of being and sacramental ontology?
Answer 5: I think there are three different ideas (Przywara, Boersma, Milbank). I don’t agree with any of them (laugh). But they are all good idea. They are all beautiful idea. So I mean, just to say a word about Przywara, I have another article on where I disagree with Przywara. I agree with Hans Urs von Balthasar in his criticism of Przywara. I have worked a lot on the debate between Karl Barth and Przywara. Przywara was a German polish Jesuit who debated the great protestant theologian Karl Barth about analogy of being in natural knowledge of God, Przywara argued against Barth that the analogical knowledge of God from philosophy is a structuring principle for Catholic theology. My view is we need metaphysics and analogia entis (the analogy of being), analogical metaphysics to think about God, and we need this philosophy in Catholic theology. It does not have to be Aquinas. It could be Scotus. It could be Bonaventure. It could be Przywara. It could be Balthasar. It could be John Paul II. There are different ways to understand natural knowledge of God. But I think we need some kind of metaphysical way to think about God naturally in philosophy. However, I do not believe it structures theology because theology is not the science of being. It’s not the study of metaphysics. It’s the study of the Trinity, Christology, and the Church. So the structural precepts are the principles of the Nicene Creed, the principles given by revelation. We need the principles of revelation, the Nicene Creed: I believe in God the Father, God the Son, the Holy Spirit, Church, and sacraments. We need good philosophy. Theology implies both the principles of theology and good philosophy together. I think Przywara almost made philosophy the center of theology. He was a philosopher. So that was a criticism. He was criticized by Gottlieb Sohngen who was a German professor who taught Ratzinger. He was criticized by von Balthasar. I agree with Sohngen and Ratzinger and von Balthasar that Przywara made philosophy a little too important. I agree it’s important. I agree it’s necessary. But I don’t think it’s so central. I won’t talk about Milbank and Boersma because I think they have other projects and it’s very complicated.
Question 6: We all know that Henri de Lubac’s last monumental book maybe his La postérité spirituelle de Joachim de Flore. In this book, he traces the origin of modern secularism (Hegel, Marx, etc.) to Joachim of Flore, I wonder what’s your opinion about this hidden genealogy of modernity revealed by de Lubac? (laugh)
Answer 6: That’s a great question. So, first, a word about genealogy of modernity. Who are the great masters of this? I mean one of them is Hegel. Auguste Comte is another one. But another one that is very important in the 20th century is Heidegger on the forgiveness of Being, that the eclipse of Being in modern theology and modern philosophy. The problem with genealogy is everyone has a different genealogy. Now, if we study the beginnings of modernity in Europe, clearly some things are obviously important: Nominalism, the nominal philosophy of Occam, the Reformation, the Reformation contributed to modernity, the secular side of the Renaissance, and then you have, obviously, the Enlightenment. You have the radical Enlightenment of Spinoza. You have the moderate Enlightenment of Locke. You have the middle position of Kant between the two. You have the conservative Enlightenment of Leibniz. We can talk about these genealogies generally but I think we should be careful to think that one genealogy is going to explain everything. People write new genealogy when they discover something new. De Lubac first wrote the genealogy of the loss of the supernatural because the Thomists of Dominicans like Cajetan and Jesuits like Suarez lost the real Aquinas. We have to get back to real Aquinas. It’s dangerous because people stop reading all the theology between Aquinas and de Lubac. They say that we have to go back and start all over. Similarly, when you get a genealogy of modernity based on Joachim, it’s a kind of peculiar, you have to be careful of saying: it explains everything. But Joachim clearly say something. Joachim is one of the first people to argue within Catholicism, using theological reasons, why we should end Catholicism. (laugh) It’s a Catholic theologian giving an argument for how we will surpass Catholicism historically. That’s very strange. You might call it a theological suicide or theological self-destruction. We will eventually be so spiritual. We won’t need the Church, we won’t need bishops, we won’t need dogmas, we won’t need sacraments, we’ll be spiritual men, and we’ll live in a spiritual age. Now it’s clear that you can start to see how there are echoes of this in some of the prophetical traditions, more the radical reform in Switzerland, and you can definitely then start to work with parallel. The real question raises is, here’s the question it raises, for me that’s very interesting, to what extent is the Enlightenment a theology, not just a philosophy. Because part of what’s going on in the Enlightenment and a thinker like Immanuel Kant, the idea that the age of pure reason can create a new social order, a new Church, and a new spiritual age of greater perfection. The ancient Greek philosophers and the ancient Chinese philosophers were unlikely to take this historical view of a historical perfection over time that we are going to a more perfect history. And it’s true that we don’t know the future. So why do we say that we will make it to a more perfect age? Obviously, one of the reasons historically is the prophets of Israel brought the idea that God is telling us that a more perfect age will come. And then Christianity talks about this in the age of the Holy Spirit, the final age of the world. It’s clear that in people like Immanuel Kant, Hegel, Schelling, you have something like a historical prophetism. The world is moving in a better direction. And it’s a kind of theological idea. So I think it’s a provocation. I think for a theologian it’s a very interesting question. Why do I believe in historical progress in the Church? De Lubac shows Thomas Aquinas’ criticisms of Joachim. Thomas Aquinas points out that we live already in the age of the Spirit. We have the grace of Christ. But we have the grace of Christ in a humanity that is still weak and frail, wounded by sin. And our humanity still needs the very structures, institutions Christ initiated, the Church, sacraments, the Church teachings, Scripture, like the ways that we come to communion with God through Scripture, tradition, liturgy, sacraments, Church, doctrine, saints, then the communion of the Church, which is preserved by the bishops. So de Lubac follows Aquinas with an anti-utopian argument about the need for the structures of Christ to live in the age of the Spirit. Von Balthasar wrote another nice essay, Spirit and Institution, arguing that we have to always have both, charism, spiritual gifts, spiritual prophetism, spiritual movement, life, and institution. So if you have institution without the Spirit, it can become dead. But if you have the Spirit without institution, it can destroy the Church. So you have to have the institutions and you have to have a spiritual life. You have to have life in the Spirit and you have to preserve the institutions of Christ. So they’re thinking about that balance. You can have a reactive traditionalism of institutions without the Spirit. You can have a spiritual life that doesn’t have any institutional communion. So we have to have both together.
Question 7: I’m very curious about this idea of communion. I think on the one hand, we have a kind of supernatural community, and our Church will ultimately be the kingdom of God. And on the other hand, in this world, we also have many types of nature community, for example, family. What’s the tension between the two types of communion? Does the supernatural communion ultimately perfect the natural communion? Or the supernatural just limits or destroys the natural because the Bible sometimes teaches us to leave our families and to pursue for a higher form of life. In ancient Chinese thought, if we are talking about any kind of communion, this companion must be grounded in the most measure type of community, especially a family one. I just wonder whether there’s a tension or ultimately, the supernatural one only perfects the natural one and lead it to a more perfect form. But I think in beatific vision, there is no family relationship anymore, right? Because now people will only love according to God, there’s only one center. This is my worry.
Answer 7: Let me tell you what I think Henri de Lubac would say. And then let me tell you what I think. I think Henri de Lubac would say to you that he never wrote his books to answer that question because he was trying to write about particular concerns. Now, the reason that’s important is he has been so successful. He and von Balthasar has been so successful in becoming a normal Catholic school that often now people read de Lubac and Balthasar but they don’t read Thomas Aquinas. Because they replaced him. The problem is your question, which is a perfectly, I mean a very important question, very traditional question, is a question that von Balthasar and de Lubac don’t ask and don’t answer. But Thomas Aquinas does asked and does answer. And I think de Lubac would say he’s just expecting you to read also Thomas Aquinas. But a lot of modern Catholic theologians don’t. So I’m just saying we need to read de Lubac and Aquinas. The tradition has answers to your question. Now I move to what I think. This is one of the reasons I’ve moved more towards Aquinas because Thomas Aquinas analyzes nature. He thinks there are successive levels of common good, the common good of the family, the common good of the city, the common good of the state, the common good of human nature, the common good of the cosmos, and the common good of God. The point is you have greater common goods and respect the lesser goods. The state should not destroy the family. The international order should not destroy the state. The Church should not destroy the state. God does not destroy the Church or the state or the family. It’s about preserving natural order. The higher order preserves the lower order. Now, does that mean we never violate the lower order? So we know Thomas Aquinas himself left his family to join the Dominicans. He was kidnapped by his parents and imprisoned because they wanted him to run the family inheritance. So he also talks about the order of charity. When you love Christ, you have the love of Christ in you. Do you love your parents more than other people? He says normally you do. Because grace builds on nature and sanctified nature. It is natural to love your parents more than other people. So you naturally love your parents by the charity of Christ. But because you prefer Christ to all things and Christ can call you to a religious vocation, you can disobey your parents for the sake of Christ. But when you do it, you do it because you love your parents, to show them the Christ is real and to help them believe in Christ. He says you don’t act for the higher order to destroy the lower order, but to help perfect the lower order, and sometimes that involves disobedience, but normally involves preserving natural order, including the order of the family. Another example is the sacrament of marriage. Why is there a sacrament in Catholicism that sanctifies the natural marriage? Because the family is so important to human nature. God gives grace to elevate it as a way to live in Christ and the family can become a sacred bond in Christ, so that’s very important.
Question 8: What does Catholicism mean? Does it have a relation with ecclesiology, or does it mean Catholic? Does it help the Church’s communion in reality?
Answer 8: It’s a great question. In French or in English you’ve added -ism (catholicism) like humanism, communism, consumerism, capitalism, individualism, and collectivism. So some people criticize to de Lubac because they say the Catholic Church is not an -ism. If you make it an -ism, you make it a political movement. You make it an ideology. I think that’s a little too extreme. When he says Catholicism, I think he means the idea of the Catholic Christianity, in a way like John Henry Newman talks about the idea of Christianity, meaning there’s a kind of unity to the vision. I think Catholicism here means a unified vision of Christianity in a Catholic mode. Now does it help with ecclesiology? Does it mean universal? De Lubac thinks the Catholic Church is the universal Church founded by Christ. I think he is a triumphalist. I wrote another article on the triumphalism of de Lubac. But it’s very important that the book Catholicism presents it as an inclusive triumphalism. In other words, because the Catholic Church is the fullness of the truth about Christ and salvation. It can help non-Christian humanists; it can help Protestants; it can help the Jews; it can speak to Muslims; it can speak to Buddhists because it has the fullness of the truth. But it can also appreciate the ways of approaching the truths of the others and invite them into Christian reflection. So for Protestants, for example, de Lubac is going to talk about the importance of the Eucharist and the visible communion of the Church, not to attack Protestants but to suggest that they can also receive from this idea of the Eucharist. This is where Hans Boersma, who is a Protestant, thinks de Lubac is right about this. Protestants need a sacramental ecclesiology and ecclesiology based on the sacraments of communion. He has listened to de Lubac. De Lubac wants to talk with secular humanists, not attack them. He thinks that the Church has a collective mission that’s open to the dialogue with secular humanism, not against it. Does it help? I think de Lubac helps us think about the collectivity of the Church. However, today often, we Christians have a very individual decision to make and often a difficult individual road of responsibility. De Lubac doesn’t speak to that as much. He speaks to the communion of the Church. But what about the individual choice to follow Christ? That’s not his concern. But I think our theology today also has to talk about individual witness and individual decision.
Question 9: Are the words and languages in the Bible go beyond the limited historical social context?
Answer 9: Great question. De Lubac does not ask that question. Very few modern theologians ask that question. I think Ratzinger asked that question. I think what we have to show is modern historical critical scholarship. I am supportive of modern historical critical scholarship. There are many good modern biblical scholars and and there are bad modern biblical scholars, I think. (laugh) Most of them are influenced by Immanuel Kant, whether they know it or not. So I think they tend to think that if I study the biblical author in the historical context, I understand the entire range of reference. But when we study Aristotle or Plato, who wrote before the New Testament, we don’t read them as only speaking to Greek men in Athens at that time. Plato makes claims about all reality. Aristotle makes claims about all reality. So why can’t Jesus or Paul make claims about all reality? Or Moses or the prophet Amos or the Gospel of John. So I do think we need to study the historical context of the Bible. It’s very helpful. But we need to remember that these people, even though they wrote in a different time in a different place, are also making claims that are universal. Jesus makes universal claims about his own importance. Paul makes universal claims about human nature, about Jesus, about the death of Jesus, and about the resurrection of Jesus as affecting all human beings. So I think the harder issue is philosophical universalism. It’s proper to the human mind to think universally. We all have to engage with the question of the universal meaning of life. Atheists, Humanists, Buddhists, Christians, and everyone has to think about the universal truth. I think the Bible is also written by people thinking about the universal truth. It’s not just universal or historical context; its historical context in which they’re talking about the universal truth.
Question 10: How does Dominican spirituality play a role in your intellectual life?
Answer 10: In the Dominican order, we have a life structured around prayer in the morning and evening. During the day, Mass, sacraments, also preaching and teaching the faith. What I’m doing with you is very normal for me, teaching classes like this is very normal. But it’s also about studying the question of who God is in a personal way. I try to understand who Christ is, who God is, and to think about grace in my own life and my own conversion. So there’s in the Dominican life, a deep integration, and unity between study, teaching, and personal conversion try to find God. But you keep the things distinct: when I’m teaching, I’m not praying. When I’m in a liturgy, it’s a little different than my own conversion. All is connected. The order was created by Saint Dominic, so that you could have study and teaching be connected to your own life of prayer and your own life of personal conversion and discovery of God. The other thing about the Dominican life is we are supposed to be vulnerable to real questions. We’re supposed to read Nietzsche. We are supposed to read Marx. We’re supposed to read Hume. We’re supposed to read Kant. We’re supposed to read Bultmann. We have to read the modern biblical critical scholarship. We have to study modern science. We can’t all read all of it. We have specialties. I work more in modern theological dialogue. I have friends who work in modern science. I have friends who work in modern ethics. We talk to each other. But it’s a communion of scholars trying to really study our contemporary world, the real world around us, and also think theologically about God.
Question 11: How de Lubac view Buddhism?
Answer 11: De Lubac wrote a book on Buddhism. And it’s a very important first modern work of scholarship about Buddhism. He’s very brave to get involved in studying another religion deeply: if you look at the table of contents, it’s really a series of studies. The first chapter on Buddhist charity and Buddhist ethics of compassion. The second, two cosmic trees: the tree under which the buddha was enlightened and the tree of the cross. It’s a comparison of symbolism of the Buddhist tree of the enlightenment and the cross in relation to Buddhist cosmology in art, Christian cosmology in art. Christ crucified at the center of the cosmos. The buddha enlightened under the tree at the center of the cosmos. The third part of the book is on different manifestations of Christ and the Buddha in the different traditions. So we look at that and see what he’s doing. The first thing he does is he takes the point of contact between Buddhism and Christianity. The closest is the doctrine of compassion. That’s an interpretation. You can dispute that. You can argue. But that’s I think my interpretation is trying to do that. So Buddhists and Christians can talk to each other about Christian Charity, Buddhist compassion, and the social ethics. It’s trying to find the thing we have in common first. Secondly, what’s the study of art? Why the two trees? This is just like the Fathers of the Church, the patristic authors, like Clement of Alexandria. Clement of Alexandria reads the ancient stories about Plato and the ancient stories like Plato’s birth, Plato’s death, the Greco-Roman religions about the gods, as symbols of human encounter with the divine. Now, Clement of Alexandria thinks they’re mythological, not real. But he thinks that they are symbols of humanity trying to imagine contact with the absolute, humanity trying to represents, in Greco Roman religious tradition, symbols of encounter with the divine. De Lubac believes we have a natural desire for the divine. So we can look in non-Christian culture and find mythology, art, and symbolism of a desire for union with the divine. So he looks at Buddha and the enlightenment and the cosmology of the art as ways the human spirit has suggested in enlightenment union with the absolute. Of course it’s different. Buddhist Nirvana is different than Christian union with God. But there’s a kind of desire for union with the absolute. And he’s trying to think about how buddha is depicted in this vast artistic, metaphysical, a connection of ideas as a kind of typology of Christ or a foreshadowing of Christ. I think that’s what’s happening. Now, He’s not doing it in just colonial eyes, he’s trying to suggest there are points of contact, their similitude and differences. The idea that the buddha can appear to you in the manifestations of Buddhist saints, it is a little bit like Christians thinking Christ manifest to us in the Christian saints. So he’s trying to find points of comparison. He is not a relativist. He doesn’t think it’s all mythology in Christianity and Buddhism. He’s a Christian. But he thinks there’s something like the grace of God working in non-Christian traditions, anticipating the encounter with God in Christ, but manifests in a different tradition. We need to respect and study and discuss with them. This is the philosophy you see in Nostra Aetate when they talk about the Buddhist and Hindu search for the absolute, through various symbols, through various traditions, and through various philosophies. The call here is to Catholic scholars, to study different metaphysical traditions in Buddhism and in Hinduism, which are quite different. They are different traditions, two different kinds of ethical, metaphysical traditions, legends, symbols, artistic schemes. Think about places of similitude and have a real dialogue with the Buddhist community.
It’s an honor for me to be with you. I think you interest in the modern Catholic Theological Tradition is important. Please know I’m entirely supportive in whatever way I can be supportive. I’m happy to do more classes in the future but also to help you find other people who can present, including more presenters, all about de Lubac because I have friends who work on de Lubac. Feel free to be in touch with me.（同塵 老刀 整理）
