blip : Beyond Lost Intellectual Ponderings :

The Third Council of Constantinople locates true humanity in Jesus Christ. He is “perfect in divinity and perfect in humanity, the same truly God and truly man.” If Jesus is perfect in humanity and truly human, then I have to wonder what it means to call myself “human.” What is a human? What are the criteria? Where must I stand in order to see how I am human? This man who lived so long ago tells me how I am human yet I cannot cross the abyss of time and space to gaze at his humanity and see if my body might qualify as “human.” Am I human? Are you?

The rationalist voice that came to dominate conversations about the human being disturbed Henri de Lubac—possibly the greatest 20th century Catholic theologians (that might be unfair to Karl Rahner and Hans Urs von Balthasar). Under the scientist’s microscope human nature is mastered, controlled, every part of the nature is mapped upon a system of explanation. Under the gaze of the phenomenologist the human is reduced to “an inextricable knot of natural relationships” (Brief Catechesis on Nature and Grace, p.17). Human nature is constructed to fit the mold of the modern ethos (think of the presuppositions of any argument about homosexuality, or of figuring out who to kill—e.g. abortion, war).

Henri de Lubac cannot breathe, or, at least, he is joining us in our fight to breathe through the totalizing descriptions of humanness. The modern spirit put a pillow over our head, and we are suffocating as we gasp for the divine. Turning to the resources of ages past, de Lubac spoke an old word in a new accent—surnaturel—against rationalistic determinism. In his struggle to speak the new life of the gospel he created space for the human to breathe the transcendent; his is a battle for the possibility of the divine life in human lives.

In the twentieth-century de Lubac faces what David Schindler calls “Catholic theology’s exile from modern culture” (Mystery of the Supernatural, p.xi). De Lubac found himself in a cultural climate that would not accept Christian discourse about the supernatural. Modernity evacuated the transcendent from conceptions of the world. With the “disappearance of the sense of the sacred,” theologians had the difficult task of re-discovering a language in which to proclaim a faith that is tied up with the relationship between human and divine (Theology in History, pp.223-240). Since the ethos of rationalism permeated all conceptions of the world irrespective of any church/world divide, de Lubac found an estranged space called nouvelle théologie from which, through his project of ressourcement, he could re-infuse the material with the spiritual.

The reason de Lubac gives for the necessary recovery of the supernatural is that without it humanity loses the ability to speak meaningfully about those things essential to our nature. The language of the supernatural posits an order of relation between the transcendent and the human. De Lubac writes, “What the term designates is not so much God or the order of divine things considered in itself, in its pure transcendence, as, in a general and as yet indeterminate manner, the divine order considered in its relationship of opposition to, and of union with, the human order”(Brief Catechesis, 20). Thus ‘the supernatural’ gives us the necessary language to make sense of the mysterious relationship of divine and human. It gives us warrant to speak about the unspeakable mysteries of life. It is the language that creates the possibility for humans to conceptualize the Christian faith. To disregard the “fundamental distinction” which ‘the supernatural’ names “would be to deny…in its very principle every notion of revelation, mystery, divine Incarnation, redemption or salvation” (ibid, p.21).

The naturalistic reduction of humanness for the purpose of fulfilling the scientific drive for exhaustive explanation confines “man in parenthesis,” as de Lubac puts it. He writes,

“You cannot put man in parentheses, even for excellent objectives. Nothing is more dangerous, or rather nothing is more fatal on any assumption: for either man runs the risk of perishing thereby, through suffocation; or else, if he escapes, it is at the expense of those excellent objectives, which are compromised by this offense” (Paradoxes of Faith, p. 123).

The atmosphere of secularism suffocates the human by denying the spiritual desire hidden in the depths of the human. Any reach from the inner recesses of the soul toward the supernatural atmosphere of the divine is denied in the name of coherent explanations of the natural. Humans cannot mysteriously breathe the supernatural because that unsettles the established understanding of the human being in terms of a natural horizon. When the human does escape from under the thumb of a strictly rationalistic system of explanation, the secular conceptual framework comes crashing down. In a sense, the supernatural becomes the enemy of the secular spirit. It must not emerge; it must be suffocated.

Where many Catholic theologians who follow St. Thomas Aquinas consider their task in terms of fidelity to the tradition of Thomism, de Lubac seems to be guided by a different tradition. Given his extensive writings on figures and traditions as diverse as Buddhism and Nietzsche, one cannot help but wonder where de Lubac’s allegiance lies. If some Thomists do not think he fits squarely in their camp (and believe me, there are plenty), from what tradition does he speak? If de Lubac still remains a Thomist, his variety might find company with another who lies on the borderlands of Thomism: Cornelius Ernst. Fidelity to his sort of tradition shifts from source to source as he remains focused on one subject: the human being. Ernst writes, “I have another tradition to which I am almost equally respectful in some ways more so—the tradition of the human heart…. It must be possible to find and adore God in the complexity of human experience” (Multiple Echo, p.1). Like Ernst, de Lubac is captured by the wonder of the human being, the complex mysteries of the humanness hidden deep within the human heart. These depths escape the end of a scalpel (Theology in History, p.217). It slides out from under the surgeon’s eye because its very essence invites the supernatural “touches God” (Mystery of the Supernatural, p.113-114). The human nature escapes exhaustive examination because our nature is made of an “unstable ontological constitution” (ibid)—”Le centre de gravité de l’homme se trouve en dehors de lui” (Karl Rahner quoted in de Lubac, Histoire et Espirite [1950], p.157). As St. Paul says in I Cor. 2:11, “For what human being knows what is truly human except the human spirit that is within?” (Theology in History, p.129).

Since the human being does not possess the center of its nature and cannot explain its essence, the mystery of the supernatural calls us into new explorations, further journeys of self-discovery—which, for de Lubac, happens in the mission of the church. He writes, “Humanity is one, organically one by its divine structure; it is the Church’s mission to reveal to men that pristine unity that they have lost, to restore and complete it” (Catholicism, p.53). De Lubac teaches us that the mystery of our humanity should not lead us in anxious quests of mastery. Rather, as we feel the pull of the supernatural all we can do is pray with Augustine: “You have made us for yourself, O God, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you” (Confessions 1.1, quoted in de Lubac, Mystery of the Supernatural, p.65). But the prayer must not be prayed with an introspective gaze. There is no “center of gravity” there—the essence of our nature is always elsewhere: neither statically here nor there, but dancing in the borders: “it is Christ who appears rather as a center, an atmosphere, a whole world even, in which man and God, man and man, are in communion and achieve union” (Catholicism, p.45).

The resurrected Jesus who is present in the gathered community of faith, dances among us shedding light on what it means to be human. The Christian journey is a constant discovery of our humanity in and with each other. Christ is the “revelation of man to himself” who appears in “the other, every other” as we learn our “”common origin and…our common destiny” (ibid, pp.339-340). Henri de Lubac invites us into the perpetual discovery of our supernatural destiny as we turn to the other whose restless heart joins with ours in hopes of touching the Truly Human One in whose image we are beckoned—as Thomas Aquinas says, the human is created toward God’s likeness (Summa Theologiae 1.93.2). The other offers me reason to hope because in the movement of our “persisting difference” we are made free to breathe Christ who is our atmosphere (Catholicism, p.341). In the “real apperception that seizes at a single glance” of an other, I come to see the mysterious possibilities of my Humanity (ibid). Since the unstable self finds its center of gravity—this Christ “who fills all in all”—with the other, the caress of the divine that tells me I am human comes in the holy kiss and the handshake of peace (ibid, p.45); this movement toward the other as we wander towards the beatific vision is “the embrace of God in Christ” (ibid, p.224). De Lubac’s call to recast nature in terms of the supernatural gestures towards an ontological reality that helps us heed the pastoral counsel of Sebastian Moore: “look forward to the point when the whole mystery of God will be known in the clasp of your brother [or sister’s] hand” (God is a New Language, p.141).

(the above are some excerpts from a much longer paper I wrote. If you are interested in reading the paper or are interested in some of de Lubac’s work, please email me: isv2@duke.edu)