“Henri de Lubac was a Jesuit theologian, educated at Jesuit centers in France and England before the First World War. (Unlike some of his confrères, he received no other formal academic training.) In that war he suffered a serious wound in the head, a wound which affected him somewhat throughout his long life. In the inter-war years, he was the central but sometimes shadowy figure of a diverse new theological movement in France which called for a rejection of neo-scholasticism and for a tempering of the scholastic stress upon speculation with a renewed interest in history, biblical exegesis, typology, art, literature, and mysticism. (Other important names are Jean Daniélou, M.-D. Chenu, Henry Bouillard, Yves Congar, and Gaston Fessard.) The initial aim was resourcement — a recovery of the riches of Christian tradition, especially prior to 1300. The eventual aim though, was a renewal of speculative theology in a new mode that would restore its closeness to the exegetical, mystical, and liturgical reading of revealed signs. With the publication of Catholicisme in 1938, de Lubac produced one of the key texts of this movement: the book stressed the social character of the Church as the true universal community in embryo, rather than as a mere external machinery for the saving of individual souls. Accordingly it encouraged an open yet critical engagement with the world. Already here, one of the ‘paradoxical’ axes of de Lubac’s thought was apparent: ‘Catholic’ expresses a reach of divine grace that is all-encompassing — to the entire past and future and all of space, worldly and cosmic, extending beyond the explicit profession of Christianity. Yet at the same time, ‘Catholic’ means a universality whose grammar is only fully spelled out in the life of the incarnate Logos. Within this harmonious tension, the sway of de Lubac’s first and last master — Origen of Alexandria — is always apparent. Likewise evident is the practical missionary concern fused with intellectual rigor and unwillingness to compromise on essentials of a Jesuit father.
“If this follower of St. Ignatius was at all a saint, it was in a wholly militant mode. For all his reticence, de Lubac’s writings often exhibit a withering aristocratic disdain of philistine opponents, and for all the commitment to patient and exhaustive scholarship, his deliberate selection of august targets and coordinated intellectual strategy is often to the fore. Twice he was engaged in secular warfare: once, as noted, under the drastic aegis of the French Republic which made no exemptions from military service for religious (a fellow Jesuit, and enormous intellectual influence, Pierre Rousselot, was killed in the trenches); later, during WWII, on the run from the Vichy regime and subsequently the Gestapo. At the time that he was composing his Surnaturel (arguably the key theological text of the twentieth century) he was also in touch, along with his fellow Jesuits of the School at Lyon, with the Gaullist resistance. His confrère and intellectual collaborator Yves de Montcheuil was captured and martyred by the Gestapo. And it is vital to grasp that de Lubac’s and de Montcheuil’s political opponents — Catholic Rightists supporting the Vichy regime and collaborating with the occupying Germans — were also their theological opponents, who reported what they regarded as dubious theological opinions as well as their dubious secular involvements back up the chains of Jesuit and Dominican command to Rome itself. (It should be stressed, though, that de Lubac’s enemies in the French Catholic hierarchy were often well to the right of Pius XII and his advisors in the Vatican.)
“Surnaturel was an intentional body blow to the neoscholastic understandings of reason and grace, as well as to neoscholastic conceptions of philosophy and theology and the relation between them. It was not that it advocated a particular view on a particular theological topic; it was rather that it implicitly (indeed in an almost coded fashion) dismantled the entire set of reigning Catholic and perhaps Protestant) assumptions about the character of Christian intellectual reflection. Moreover, it did so not in the name of innovation but of an authentic tradition which it sought to recover.”
— from John Milbank, The Suspended Middle: Henri de Lubac and the Debate concerning the Supernatural (2nd revised edition, Eerdmans, 2012)
Below is a 12-minute conversation between John Milbank and his colleague Simon Oliver about the significance of Henri de Lubac’s work.
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