Henri de Lubac: The Theology of Unity
by A. Joseph Lynch - July 20, 2013
by A. Joseph Lynch - July 20, 2013
Henri de Lubac stands as a giant among the theologians of the twentieth century. The following will address the theme of unity as it runs through several of his major works: A Brief Catechesis on Nature and Grace, The Drama of Atheist Humanism, Catholicism, and The Splendor of the Church.
I. A Brief Catechesis on Nature and Grace
The argument from desire for the existence of God is as much an argument about man (that he is a homo religiosus) as it is about God. In short, the argument states: since every innate desire in man corresponds to some real object of satisfaction, and since in man there is a deep desire which cannot be satisfied by anything in this world, it follows that there must exist a Being beyond this world in whom alone may man’s deepest desire be satisfied. This argument demonstrates far more than the existence of a transcendent being called ‘God’; it makes a strong argument for union with God as man’s true and only end. St. Augustine makes the same argument in his famous saying: “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” In Gaudium et Spes, the Second Vatican Council echoes the conclusion reached by the argument from desire and St. Augustine when it declared that “the ultimate vocation of man is in fact one, and divine.” Man has but one and only end, and this end is supernatural.
Man’s supernatural end was a matter of great debate in the wake of de Lubac’s Surnaturel. In this work, de Lubac draws on Scripture and the Fathers to outline his conception of the supernatural and its relation to nature while refuting a more popular view which originated with the late-scholastics. The late-scholastic view, according to de Lubac, drew such a radical division between nature and the supernatural that both may be described as “two substantial natures, incapable of copenetrating each other, one of which would override the other.” A dangerous consequence was “the idea of ‘pure nature’ conceived of as having a purely natural end.” Hence, a being that is ontologically tied to the order of ‘pure nature’ must, teleologically speaking, have a natural end. Applied to man, ‘pure nature’ posits a natural end to man in addition to his supernatural end. This conception treated the supernatural like the second floor of a building, sitting atop nature beneath it. If we furthered the analogy, we might say that, prior to the addition of the second floor (i.e. the supernatural), the first floor (i.e. nature) could have remained as it was and attained its own (purely natural) perfection. De Lubac forcefully rejects this conception. Quoting another remarkable theologian, Louis Bouyer, de Lubac offers the following refutation:
"Because grace is called ‘created’ some argued that it must be a second nature, superimposed on our original nature, a ‘supernature’... If [however] grace... is created, it is created in the soul. This means... that it is not a superior and distinct nature added to the soul as a sort of cloak. It is a quality infused into the soul."
How then does de Lubac conceive the relationship between nature and the supernatural? His first step is to define the supernatural in terms which distinguish it, without radically dividing it, from nature. According to his definition, “the term supernatural designates... not so much God or the order of divine things considered in itself [but rather] the divine order considered in its relationship with, opposition to, and of union with, the human order.” He also notes the gratuitous character of the supernatural, for between it and nature there exists an abyss which may be crossed only by divine love. Man’s desire for his supernatural end may be built into his nature, but the gratuity of that end remains an “un-naturalizable” gift. De Lubac unites the gratuitous character of the supernatural with our earlier definition in the following way: the supernatural “is that divine element which man’s efforts cannot reach... but which unites itself to man.” Rather than treating the supernatural as superimposed upon nature as a second floor is built upon a first, the supernatural forms a much deeper union with nature, penetrating and transfiguring nature so as to enable it to live out the divine life and one day attain its supernatural end.
II. The Drama of Atheist Humanism
Although The Drama of Atheist Humanism is primarily concerned with philosophical matters, it is an important bridge between de Lubac’s refutation of pure nature and his conception of man’s unity. The Catholic theologian’s acceptance of ‘pure nature’ provided an opening for the atheist humanist to rival the old unity of Catholicism with such wholistic proposals as Auguste Comte’s positivist religion.
De Lubac notes “the danger of the theologian who makes too many compromises to the demands of controversy.” By doing so he allows many “implicit concessions to his opponent.” It was precisely this danger that led de Lubac to consider the ‘pure nature’ formulations of Cajetan as a capitulation to the concerns and categories of sixteenth century Protestantism rather than as a refutation of Protestantism. In giving man two independent ends, the natural and the supernatural, Cajetan’s concession left future theologians in some ways stunted in their ability to reject an atheist humanism which gladly rejected man’s supernatural end in favor of his ‘purely natural’ end. For an atheist humanist like Auguste Comte, man’s schizophrenic ends meant a battle between two opposite but parallel religions: his purely natural positivist religion of Humanity and the supernatural religion of the Catholic Church. The Comtean view, however, points out another concession that dates back to the sixteenth century: the rise of individualism. Comte viewed the transition from fifteenth century Christianity to its more modern form as the “forsaking [of] ‘love one another’ for ‘save your soul’” – a remarkable shift indeed!
The emphasis given to personal salvation is, according to de Lubac, a relatively modern phenomenon. Its roots are found not in St. Paul, nor in St. Augustine, but in Protestantism. Although atheism is doomed to bankruptcy and thus unable to practice the command of loving one’s neighbor, Comte was rightly attracted to the former command while repelled by the mentality expressed in the latter. For Comte, the Christian emphasis on personal salvation created “an agglomeration of individuals... who, each exclusively occupied with his own salvation, regard cooperation in the salvation of others merely as a good means of working out their own.” Christianity is thus, according to Comte, an anti-social and escapist institution which implores its adherents to forsake the natural order, particularly its social bonds, and ascend as individuals to the supernatural order. Comte understood far better than most moderns that human nature is inconceivable apart from certain ordered social bonds and their attendant obligations.
Was Comte’s criticism of modern Christianity justified? De Lubac thinks so. It is true that Protestantism suffered from individualism more than the Catholics, but we are confronted once more with the danger de Lubac spoke of above – it is terribly difficult to combat a heresy without it in some way shaping your own conception of the issue at hand. Individualism left its disfiguring mark on the life of the Church in the centuries following the Council of Trent. Were not the sacraments taught almost exclusively as the sources of grace for one’s salvation without much consideration of them as sources of unity? While marriage and the church are developed as social institutions within the theological tradition, a public theology of city and nation seems lacking.
Before addressing de Lubac’s response (and solution) to these criticisms it is important to first outline Comte’s solution as contrast. Although he ultimately found the same Christian weaknesses in Catholicism, he nevertheless believed the Catholic Church was the highest and noblest of religions. Though to him ultimately a lie, he saw the greatness that Catholicism could be and he created a parallel structure in his own humanist religion. Scientists were the new priests of humanity, and technological advancement provided the new sacred vessels of man’s worship. Moreover, he created his own calendar of humanist saints, viewed himself as the pope of humanism – and he even postulated a kind of social body that mimicked the Body of Christ. The central difference between the two was humanism’s inversion of the imago Dei; no longer is man made in God’s image but God in man’s, and thus for Comte it is Humanity that must be worshipped rather than God.
Comte’s humanist religion, as he conceived of it, was obviously not successful. Neither was it pure folly. Comte perceived something about man which Christianity at the time seemed to have lost. God’s enemies take ground where we leave a deficit in our teaching and practice. Recognizing the weaknesses exploited by atheist humanism, de Lubac sought a remedy. His answer to atheist humanism was ultimately to refute it as a counterfeit of the only true humanism: the humanism revealed in the incarnate Christ.
III. Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man
While de Lubac presented a philosophical rebuttal of atheist humanism in The Drama of Atheist Humanism, his full-throated theological counterstroke is presented in Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man. For de Lubac, the twin ruptures of the natural from the supernatural and the individual from the social can only be healed in Christ. It is precisely in Christ that man arrives, united in one body, at his supernatural end. Christ, “in the fullness of time,” comes at the end of a history that is both cosmic and salvific. He is both the cosmic Christ through and for whom all things are made, as well as the New Adam in whom man, radically individualized by sin, is reconstituted and redeemed. Since the nineteenth century the work of atheist humanists like Comte, Marx, and their successors have attempted to offer a coherent plan for the human race. For de Lubac, Christianity cannot defeat atheist humanism without presenting its own coherent vision of man. This vision, however, first requires a return to a theocentric and Christocentric understanding of humanity. In Catholicism, de Lubac begins laying the foundation for such a venture. This is predicated on understanding the Catholic view of unity. In Catholicism, he notes that, apart from Christianity, man tended to either isolate the individual or subsume him into one substance. In his rejection of individualism, de Lubac also wished to dispel the notion that the only other option was absorption of the individual into the whole. De Lubac offered a third option through an ontological formula: “unite in order to distinguish.” Paradoxically, “the distinction between the different parts of a being stands out the more clearly as the union of these parts is closer. The less they are ‘fragments’ the more they are ‘members’, and the greater is their convergence into unity.” De Lubac naturally uses the Trinity and the incarnation as examples of this: just as the Persons of the Trinity are distinct but not separate, and just as Christ’s two natures are united without confusion, so man, made in the image of God, was created to participate in, and be a reflection of, this likeness. Man’s unconfused unity, for de Lubac, was not meant to be an added benefit of the paschal mystery, but rather man’s natural state in Adam which was then to be brought to perfection in the incarnate Christ. Citing the Fathers, de Lubac understands sin as the atomization of man and the breaking up of his original unity.
De Lubac developed his conception of man’s original unity within the context of natrual history. Man’s unconfused unity implies, as St. Paul’s image of the body exemplifies, a structure, order, hierarchy, and harmony that is tied to the natural order. Indeed, de Lubac’s conception of nature and the supernatural, which does not radically separate the two, prompted him to look at the unfolding elective plan which culminated in the creation of Adam. Here de Lubac sees in the natural order a kind of natural foreshadowing of man’s complexity and unity:
"In certain elementary plants, composed of the one same material, unity is so weak that every piece cut from the stalk produces a new plant. On the other hand in those cases where there is a complicated network of cells, the whole organism is concentrated and individuality of the parts works for the unity of the whole..."
Given our own advances in scientific discovery since he wrote Catholicism, to his biological account we might add the pre-biological drawing together of matter to create the building blocks of life, be it the drawing together of particles into atoms, atoms into particular elements, and elements into organic molecules. The vast majority of matter is being flung out and separated into a cold expanse of death in the expanding, dissipating outer reaches of space. On Earth, however, an ever-narrowing, nearly five billion year process of election has drawn together and organized a small portion of the material universe to sustain the development of higher orders of life. Here man stands at the pinnacle of creation only insofar as he forms a unified and organized body. The individualization of man resulting from sin not only divides man from his supernatural end, it dislodges him from his proper position in the natural order.
Standing at the apex of cosmic history, man’s being as the highest form of physical life places him above the elementary plants de Lubac spoke of; he cannot be separated into many pieces and replanted. Sinful man, broken and individuated, has been severed into his constituent parts. In this state he cannot regenerate himself like a plant, but, like a body, only decompose. This is not to say that after sin human nature is utterly corrupted, but rather that human nature is fallen and doomed to eternal death if it remains in its atomized state. Man must be, so to speak, ‘re-Adamized’ if he is to be de-atomized. Nevertheless, even in man’s fallen state de Lubac sees some shadow of man’s original unity when he compares a crowd of mere individuals to a body of men organized for a common purpose. Had there been no human sin, the incarnate Christ was to find Adam and his sons organized as body under a head acting as one man to fulfill their original mission: to multiply and seize dominion of the world from the Evil One. Sin, however, necessitated the immergence of salvation history and its long climb up Mount Calvary. The Incarnation would invariably come but it would also require the redemption, and thus the cosmic Christ must also be the New Adam. He must fight the fight Adam shirked, reconstitute the fallen sons of Adam as the redeemed sons of God, and send them once more from Eden to spread the dominion of God’s Kingdom.
While de Lubac’s notion of brotherhood shall be discussed further in Part Four, de Lubac’s thought concerning the relationship between the incarnate Christ as Adamic and cosmic must be briefly addressed. Here de Lubac’s theology follows a careful path between the pitfalls of Matthew Fox’s panentheist ‘creation spirituality’ on the one hand, and, on the other, a theology that negatively defines the Incarnation in terms of sin. Where ‘creation spirituality’ depersonalized Teilhard de Chardin’s conception of the cosmic Christ, de Lubac unites it with the incarnational spirituality of Blessed John Duns Scotus. For de Lubac, there was a profound convergence in Scotus’ rejection of a sin-centric Incarnation and Chardin’s appreciation for creation’s relation to the Son, for whom and through whom it was made. Scotus, Chardin, and de Lubac would all agree that it was for the sake of the Incarnation that God created the heavens and the earth. De Lubac’s rejection of an Incarnation defined by sin, did not denigrate redemption. Here the tension between the two is resolved by Christ’s two comings. The Incarnation may serve a redemptive purpose in the first coming, but in the second coming it achieves its cosmic and eschatological fullness. In the meantime, redeemed man must remain vigilant and carry on in his divine mission – which brings us to a discussion of the Church.
IV. The Splendor of the Church
The Splendor of the Church further develops de Lubac’s conception of unity as it applies to the Mystical Body of Christ. According to de Lubac, the Church is “a certain organism... whose members are... diverse and united. This body is a visible society, with its own proper structure, in which there is a certain division of labor.” As “a certain organism” the body of Christ is a singular, living being, not an aggregate of individuals. As in all living bodies, the life of this body can neither be sustained nor expanded without the proper function and interplay between its members. For this reason, the inner-coherency of the body is maintained through the hierarchical structure of its members. At the same time, the body’s “division of labor” serves an external purpose. For de Lubac, whose vision of the Church is shaped by his broad vision of reality, the Church is not merely turned in on itself but rather has its eyes set on its cosmic and eschatological end, wherein “the Church will be ‘a perfect man’, the perfected body of all the saints together; all one, and now one in perfection, the same Christ.”
For de Lubac, the Church cannot be reduced to either its visible or invisible dimensions. The former temptation to allow the Church to become a this-worldly, political or social movement must be resisted as much as the latter, Protestant temptation to maintain only the spiritual unity of believers. Without losing sight of her supernatural character and end, we cannot fail to overlook the visibility of the Church, which de Lubac sees “as something essential to the structure and life of the Church as Christ willed her to be, [and] is divine in foundation... there is a ‘sociological incarnation of the Body of Christ’ that is part of its essence.” What’s more, deLubac contrasts the individual body of Christ with the Mystical Body of Christ, declaring that Mystical Body is Christ’s “definitive Body” and that “the individual body of Christ may be called a figurative body” in relation to the Mystical Body. Rather than doing injustice to Christ’s earthly body, de Lubac strongly rejects any notion that the ‘Mystical Body’ is somehow less visible than the body in which Christ lived, died, and rose again. The Church as the “sacrament of Christ” is by definition both visible and invisible, for it is an efficacious sign of Christ’s active presence among men, drawing them into unity with himself through his Mystical Body, the Church. Mystical does not mean invisible. Here de Lubac sees a vital connection between the Church and the Eucharist for both are efficacious signs of real unity. “The Church, like the Eucharist, is a mystery of unity... [both] must be understood by each other.” As he does in Catholicism, de Lubac stresses the social character of the Eucharist as “the sacrament ‘by which the Church is now united.’” For de Lubac it is precisely in the liturgy that the People of God become the Mystical Body and not a mere congregation. The particular group of people gathered to celebrate the Eucharist may be only one cell of the Mystical Body, but when the Mass is offered “the whole body is there virtually.” Rather than being primarily a means of an individual’s sanctification, de Lubac emphasizes the social character of the Mystical Body in both its corporate and Eucharistic dimensions. De Lubac thus writes that “we must be molten in that crucible of unity that is the Eucharist.”
De Lubac also speaks of the Church in terms of the masculine and the feminine and in doing so addresses corporate unity from two distinct perspectives. “The Church,” he says, “is both our mother and ourselves; a maternal breast and a brotherhood... she was born of the Apostles, yet they themselves were first conceived by her.” De Lubac’s words evoke Pentecost, of the Holy Spirit descending on the twelve Apostles as they encircle the Mother of God. This image of ecclesial masculinity and femininity, of protective brotherhood surrounding the beautiful and the mysterious, is not so much an image of active males versus passive females but rather a corporate way of expressing exteriority and interiority. Here the feminine is a sign of the mysterious, the hidden, and the sacred which is threatened with desecration if left unprotected. Her relation to the protective brotherhood, however, is reciprocal: as the brotherhood protects her integrity, her pure presence and beauty strengthen their bonds.
De Lubac asserts that “many natural bonds must be severed if the divine relationships of grace are to be established.” The brotherhood formed in the Mystical Body of Christ is, in many ways, an example of this assertion. First, in its widest sense, this brotherhood transcends the natural bonds of ethnicity and family, both of which have historically contributed to many divisions and antagonisms among men. In its hierarchical sense, the celibate brotherhood further transcends the natural bonds of marriage and procreation. This hierarchical brotherhood also images Christ’s relation to his Apostles in the diocesan presbyterate under its bishop and in the episcopate under the Holy Father. There is a brotherhood of priests and brotherhood of bishops. It is a brotherhood whose members are “at peace and in communion” with each other. This ecclesial model of fraternal love is not an aberration but a sanctified template for the shaping of public life in its civic forms of city and nation.
De Lubac begins The Splendor of the Church with a discussion of mystery and ends it with a discussion of Mary. Maria, anima, and ecclesia all share deep connections which exemplify the feminine, the interior, and the mysterious. De Lubac draws from the Fathers the principle that whatever may be said of the Church may be said likewise of Mary. They are thus both “the meeting place of all mysteries,” or rather the mystery of Mary is continued and deepened in the Church’s mystery. The depth of the Marian and ecclesial mystery continues, however, in the soul, for it is in the soul that this same mystery is reproduced and “is consummated by being interiorized.” The deep mystery exemplified in the feminine interiority is to be treated with great reverence. For this reason, de Lubac notes that “mystery is something that is fitly believed in obscurity, something to be meditated in silence... something [we] simply want to adore...” While Mary is no “Catholic goddess” and, contrary to panentheists like Matthew Fox, God is not “Mother”, it may be fruitful to understand the feminine character of the Church, Mary, and the soul as manifestations of the interior. When we look for this feminine principle of interiority in God, this is not expressed in any of the Persons in the Trinity or divine actions as such. Instead, is it not possible that we are being pointed towards that sacred mystery at God’s innermost depths which is ineffable?
Conclusion: The Contribution of Henri de Lubac
Henri de Lubac confronted the high tide of a confident, armed atheism which had put itself forward as the champion and proponent of human unity. His response took seriously the atheist humanist criticisms of post-Reformation Christianity. The theological counterstroke that followed meant both a return to the Fathers and the Church’s Tradition regarding nature and the supernatural as well as a rejection of the individualism which stemmed from Protestant soteriology. Man has one supernatural end and he must arrive at this end as one corporate body. This did not mean that “all are saved or none are saved”. Christ became the centerpiece of his argument. Atomized by sin, the human race must be redeemed and reconstituted in the New Adam. For de Lubac, the atheist humanist who ties man to the physical laws of nature, rather than the divine law and the incarnate Christ, only ties him to those physical forces which will inevitably lead to the universe’s death. Every physicist knows that mankind and the earth as a viable planet will not be here in a few billion years. We are in a life and death struggle that encompasses both matter and spirit. If we depend only on matter, the laws of nature are relentlessly against us in the long term. Man’s only hope to escape an ultimate death is to corporately bind himself to the living Christ in his Mystical Body, the Church. Atheistic humanism bound humanity together in a death clasp— yet that formulation seemed more heroic than the Christian narrative of escaping to eternal safety one coward at a time. De Lubac’s Catholic vision of man was of man as a whole. He says yes to the atheistic humanists that we humans are tied together but not in a death clasp waiting for a meteor to hit or the heat from an expanding Sun to end our sorry tale. Humanity is drawn together in the Church as a corporate Body so we experience our common destiny which will surpass the limiting laws of matter and space. Our common destiny is eternal life in Christ.
I. A Brief Catechesis on Nature and Grace
The argument from desire for the existence of God is as much an argument about man (that he is a homo religiosus) as it is about God. In short, the argument states: since every innate desire in man corresponds to some real object of satisfaction, and since in man there is a deep desire which cannot be satisfied by anything in this world, it follows that there must exist a Being beyond this world in whom alone may man’s deepest desire be satisfied. This argument demonstrates far more than the existence of a transcendent being called ‘God’; it makes a strong argument for union with God as man’s true and only end. St. Augustine makes the same argument in his famous saying: “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” In Gaudium et Spes, the Second Vatican Council echoes the conclusion reached by the argument from desire and St. Augustine when it declared that “the ultimate vocation of man is in fact one, and divine.” Man has but one and only end, and this end is supernatural.
Man’s supernatural end was a matter of great debate in the wake of de Lubac’s Surnaturel. In this work, de Lubac draws on Scripture and the Fathers to outline his conception of the supernatural and its relation to nature while refuting a more popular view which originated with the late-scholastics. The late-scholastic view, according to de Lubac, drew such a radical division between nature and the supernatural that both may be described as “two substantial natures, incapable of copenetrating each other, one of which would override the other.” A dangerous consequence was “the idea of ‘pure nature’ conceived of as having a purely natural end.” Hence, a being that is ontologically tied to the order of ‘pure nature’ must, teleologically speaking, have a natural end. Applied to man, ‘pure nature’ posits a natural end to man in addition to his supernatural end. This conception treated the supernatural like the second floor of a building, sitting atop nature beneath it. If we furthered the analogy, we might say that, prior to the addition of the second floor (i.e. the supernatural), the first floor (i.e. nature) could have remained as it was and attained its own (purely natural) perfection. De Lubac forcefully rejects this conception. Quoting another remarkable theologian, Louis Bouyer, de Lubac offers the following refutation:
"Because grace is called ‘created’ some argued that it must be a second nature, superimposed on our original nature, a ‘supernature’... If [however] grace... is created, it is created in the soul. This means... that it is not a superior and distinct nature added to the soul as a sort of cloak. It is a quality infused into the soul."
How then does de Lubac conceive the relationship between nature and the supernatural? His first step is to define the supernatural in terms which distinguish it, without radically dividing it, from nature. According to his definition, “the term supernatural designates... not so much God or the order of divine things considered in itself [but rather] the divine order considered in its relationship with, opposition to, and of union with, the human order.” He also notes the gratuitous character of the supernatural, for between it and nature there exists an abyss which may be crossed only by divine love. Man’s desire for his supernatural end may be built into his nature, but the gratuity of that end remains an “un-naturalizable” gift. De Lubac unites the gratuitous character of the supernatural with our earlier definition in the following way: the supernatural “is that divine element which man’s efforts cannot reach... but which unites itself to man.” Rather than treating the supernatural as superimposed upon nature as a second floor is built upon a first, the supernatural forms a much deeper union with nature, penetrating and transfiguring nature so as to enable it to live out the divine life and one day attain its supernatural end.
II. The Drama of Atheist Humanism
Although The Drama of Atheist Humanism is primarily concerned with philosophical matters, it is an important bridge between de Lubac’s refutation of pure nature and his conception of man’s unity. The Catholic theologian’s acceptance of ‘pure nature’ provided an opening for the atheist humanist to rival the old unity of Catholicism with such wholistic proposals as Auguste Comte’s positivist religion.
De Lubac notes “the danger of the theologian who makes too many compromises to the demands of controversy.” By doing so he allows many “implicit concessions to his opponent.” It was precisely this danger that led de Lubac to consider the ‘pure nature’ formulations of Cajetan as a capitulation to the concerns and categories of sixteenth century Protestantism rather than as a refutation of Protestantism. In giving man two independent ends, the natural and the supernatural, Cajetan’s concession left future theologians in some ways stunted in their ability to reject an atheist humanism which gladly rejected man’s supernatural end in favor of his ‘purely natural’ end. For an atheist humanist like Auguste Comte, man’s schizophrenic ends meant a battle between two opposite but parallel religions: his purely natural positivist religion of Humanity and the supernatural religion of the Catholic Church. The Comtean view, however, points out another concession that dates back to the sixteenth century: the rise of individualism. Comte viewed the transition from fifteenth century Christianity to its more modern form as the “forsaking [of] ‘love one another’ for ‘save your soul’” – a remarkable shift indeed!
The emphasis given to personal salvation is, according to de Lubac, a relatively modern phenomenon. Its roots are found not in St. Paul, nor in St. Augustine, but in Protestantism. Although atheism is doomed to bankruptcy and thus unable to practice the command of loving one’s neighbor, Comte was rightly attracted to the former command while repelled by the mentality expressed in the latter. For Comte, the Christian emphasis on personal salvation created “an agglomeration of individuals... who, each exclusively occupied with his own salvation, regard cooperation in the salvation of others merely as a good means of working out their own.” Christianity is thus, according to Comte, an anti-social and escapist institution which implores its adherents to forsake the natural order, particularly its social bonds, and ascend as individuals to the supernatural order. Comte understood far better than most moderns that human nature is inconceivable apart from certain ordered social bonds and their attendant obligations.
Was Comte’s criticism of modern Christianity justified? De Lubac thinks so. It is true that Protestantism suffered from individualism more than the Catholics, but we are confronted once more with the danger de Lubac spoke of above – it is terribly difficult to combat a heresy without it in some way shaping your own conception of the issue at hand. Individualism left its disfiguring mark on the life of the Church in the centuries following the Council of Trent. Were not the sacraments taught almost exclusively as the sources of grace for one’s salvation without much consideration of them as sources of unity? While marriage and the church are developed as social institutions within the theological tradition, a public theology of city and nation seems lacking.
Before addressing de Lubac’s response (and solution) to these criticisms it is important to first outline Comte’s solution as contrast. Although he ultimately found the same Christian weaknesses in Catholicism, he nevertheless believed the Catholic Church was the highest and noblest of religions. Though to him ultimately a lie, he saw the greatness that Catholicism could be and he created a parallel structure in his own humanist religion. Scientists were the new priests of humanity, and technological advancement provided the new sacred vessels of man’s worship. Moreover, he created his own calendar of humanist saints, viewed himself as the pope of humanism – and he even postulated a kind of social body that mimicked the Body of Christ. The central difference between the two was humanism’s inversion of the imago Dei; no longer is man made in God’s image but God in man’s, and thus for Comte it is Humanity that must be worshipped rather than God.
Comte’s humanist religion, as he conceived of it, was obviously not successful. Neither was it pure folly. Comte perceived something about man which Christianity at the time seemed to have lost. God’s enemies take ground where we leave a deficit in our teaching and practice. Recognizing the weaknesses exploited by atheist humanism, de Lubac sought a remedy. His answer to atheist humanism was ultimately to refute it as a counterfeit of the only true humanism: the humanism revealed in the incarnate Christ.
III. Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man
While de Lubac presented a philosophical rebuttal of atheist humanism in The Drama of Atheist Humanism, his full-throated theological counterstroke is presented in Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man. For de Lubac, the twin ruptures of the natural from the supernatural and the individual from the social can only be healed in Christ. It is precisely in Christ that man arrives, united in one body, at his supernatural end. Christ, “in the fullness of time,” comes at the end of a history that is both cosmic and salvific. He is both the cosmic Christ through and for whom all things are made, as well as the New Adam in whom man, radically individualized by sin, is reconstituted and redeemed. Since the nineteenth century the work of atheist humanists like Comte, Marx, and their successors have attempted to offer a coherent plan for the human race. For de Lubac, Christianity cannot defeat atheist humanism without presenting its own coherent vision of man. This vision, however, first requires a return to a theocentric and Christocentric understanding of humanity. In Catholicism, de Lubac begins laying the foundation for such a venture. This is predicated on understanding the Catholic view of unity. In Catholicism, he notes that, apart from Christianity, man tended to either isolate the individual or subsume him into one substance. In his rejection of individualism, de Lubac also wished to dispel the notion that the only other option was absorption of the individual into the whole. De Lubac offered a third option through an ontological formula: “unite in order to distinguish.” Paradoxically, “the distinction between the different parts of a being stands out the more clearly as the union of these parts is closer. The less they are ‘fragments’ the more they are ‘members’, and the greater is their convergence into unity.” De Lubac naturally uses the Trinity and the incarnation as examples of this: just as the Persons of the Trinity are distinct but not separate, and just as Christ’s two natures are united without confusion, so man, made in the image of God, was created to participate in, and be a reflection of, this likeness. Man’s unconfused unity, for de Lubac, was not meant to be an added benefit of the paschal mystery, but rather man’s natural state in Adam which was then to be brought to perfection in the incarnate Christ. Citing the Fathers, de Lubac understands sin as the atomization of man and the breaking up of his original unity.
De Lubac developed his conception of man’s original unity within the context of natrual history. Man’s unconfused unity implies, as St. Paul’s image of the body exemplifies, a structure, order, hierarchy, and harmony that is tied to the natural order. Indeed, de Lubac’s conception of nature and the supernatural, which does not radically separate the two, prompted him to look at the unfolding elective plan which culminated in the creation of Adam. Here de Lubac sees in the natural order a kind of natural foreshadowing of man’s complexity and unity:
"In certain elementary plants, composed of the one same material, unity is so weak that every piece cut from the stalk produces a new plant. On the other hand in those cases where there is a complicated network of cells, the whole organism is concentrated and individuality of the parts works for the unity of the whole..."
Given our own advances in scientific discovery since he wrote Catholicism, to his biological account we might add the pre-biological drawing together of matter to create the building blocks of life, be it the drawing together of particles into atoms, atoms into particular elements, and elements into organic molecules. The vast majority of matter is being flung out and separated into a cold expanse of death in the expanding, dissipating outer reaches of space. On Earth, however, an ever-narrowing, nearly five billion year process of election has drawn together and organized a small portion of the material universe to sustain the development of higher orders of life. Here man stands at the pinnacle of creation only insofar as he forms a unified and organized body. The individualization of man resulting from sin not only divides man from his supernatural end, it dislodges him from his proper position in the natural order.
Standing at the apex of cosmic history, man’s being as the highest form of physical life places him above the elementary plants de Lubac spoke of; he cannot be separated into many pieces and replanted. Sinful man, broken and individuated, has been severed into his constituent parts. In this state he cannot regenerate himself like a plant, but, like a body, only decompose. This is not to say that after sin human nature is utterly corrupted, but rather that human nature is fallen and doomed to eternal death if it remains in its atomized state. Man must be, so to speak, ‘re-Adamized’ if he is to be de-atomized. Nevertheless, even in man’s fallen state de Lubac sees some shadow of man’s original unity when he compares a crowd of mere individuals to a body of men organized for a common purpose. Had there been no human sin, the incarnate Christ was to find Adam and his sons organized as body under a head acting as one man to fulfill their original mission: to multiply and seize dominion of the world from the Evil One. Sin, however, necessitated the immergence of salvation history and its long climb up Mount Calvary. The Incarnation would invariably come but it would also require the redemption, and thus the cosmic Christ must also be the New Adam. He must fight the fight Adam shirked, reconstitute the fallen sons of Adam as the redeemed sons of God, and send them once more from Eden to spread the dominion of God’s Kingdom.
While de Lubac’s notion of brotherhood shall be discussed further in Part Four, de Lubac’s thought concerning the relationship between the incarnate Christ as Adamic and cosmic must be briefly addressed. Here de Lubac’s theology follows a careful path between the pitfalls of Matthew Fox’s panentheist ‘creation spirituality’ on the one hand, and, on the other, a theology that negatively defines the Incarnation in terms of sin. Where ‘creation spirituality’ depersonalized Teilhard de Chardin’s conception of the cosmic Christ, de Lubac unites it with the incarnational spirituality of Blessed John Duns Scotus. For de Lubac, there was a profound convergence in Scotus’ rejection of a sin-centric Incarnation and Chardin’s appreciation for creation’s relation to the Son, for whom and through whom it was made. Scotus, Chardin, and de Lubac would all agree that it was for the sake of the Incarnation that God created the heavens and the earth. De Lubac’s rejection of an Incarnation defined by sin, did not denigrate redemption. Here the tension between the two is resolved by Christ’s two comings. The Incarnation may serve a redemptive purpose in the first coming, but in the second coming it achieves its cosmic and eschatological fullness. In the meantime, redeemed man must remain vigilant and carry on in his divine mission – which brings us to a discussion of the Church.
IV. The Splendor of the Church
The Splendor of the Church further develops de Lubac’s conception of unity as it applies to the Mystical Body of Christ. According to de Lubac, the Church is “a certain organism... whose members are... diverse and united. This body is a visible society, with its own proper structure, in which there is a certain division of labor.” As “a certain organism” the body of Christ is a singular, living being, not an aggregate of individuals. As in all living bodies, the life of this body can neither be sustained nor expanded without the proper function and interplay between its members. For this reason, the inner-coherency of the body is maintained through the hierarchical structure of its members. At the same time, the body’s “division of labor” serves an external purpose. For de Lubac, whose vision of the Church is shaped by his broad vision of reality, the Church is not merely turned in on itself but rather has its eyes set on its cosmic and eschatological end, wherein “the Church will be ‘a perfect man’, the perfected body of all the saints together; all one, and now one in perfection, the same Christ.”
For de Lubac, the Church cannot be reduced to either its visible or invisible dimensions. The former temptation to allow the Church to become a this-worldly, political or social movement must be resisted as much as the latter, Protestant temptation to maintain only the spiritual unity of believers. Without losing sight of her supernatural character and end, we cannot fail to overlook the visibility of the Church, which de Lubac sees “as something essential to the structure and life of the Church as Christ willed her to be, [and] is divine in foundation... there is a ‘sociological incarnation of the Body of Christ’ that is part of its essence.” What’s more, deLubac contrasts the individual body of Christ with the Mystical Body of Christ, declaring that Mystical Body is Christ’s “definitive Body” and that “the individual body of Christ may be called a figurative body” in relation to the Mystical Body. Rather than doing injustice to Christ’s earthly body, de Lubac strongly rejects any notion that the ‘Mystical Body’ is somehow less visible than the body in which Christ lived, died, and rose again. The Church as the “sacrament of Christ” is by definition both visible and invisible, for it is an efficacious sign of Christ’s active presence among men, drawing them into unity with himself through his Mystical Body, the Church. Mystical does not mean invisible. Here de Lubac sees a vital connection between the Church and the Eucharist for both are efficacious signs of real unity. “The Church, like the Eucharist, is a mystery of unity... [both] must be understood by each other.” As he does in Catholicism, de Lubac stresses the social character of the Eucharist as “the sacrament ‘by which the Church is now united.’” For de Lubac it is precisely in the liturgy that the People of God become the Mystical Body and not a mere congregation. The particular group of people gathered to celebrate the Eucharist may be only one cell of the Mystical Body, but when the Mass is offered “the whole body is there virtually.” Rather than being primarily a means of an individual’s sanctification, de Lubac emphasizes the social character of the Mystical Body in both its corporate and Eucharistic dimensions. De Lubac thus writes that “we must be molten in that crucible of unity that is the Eucharist.”
De Lubac also speaks of the Church in terms of the masculine and the feminine and in doing so addresses corporate unity from two distinct perspectives. “The Church,” he says, “is both our mother and ourselves; a maternal breast and a brotherhood... she was born of the Apostles, yet they themselves were first conceived by her.” De Lubac’s words evoke Pentecost, of the Holy Spirit descending on the twelve Apostles as they encircle the Mother of God. This image of ecclesial masculinity and femininity, of protective brotherhood surrounding the beautiful and the mysterious, is not so much an image of active males versus passive females but rather a corporate way of expressing exteriority and interiority. Here the feminine is a sign of the mysterious, the hidden, and the sacred which is threatened with desecration if left unprotected. Her relation to the protective brotherhood, however, is reciprocal: as the brotherhood protects her integrity, her pure presence and beauty strengthen their bonds.
De Lubac asserts that “many natural bonds must be severed if the divine relationships of grace are to be established.” The brotherhood formed in the Mystical Body of Christ is, in many ways, an example of this assertion. First, in its widest sense, this brotherhood transcends the natural bonds of ethnicity and family, both of which have historically contributed to many divisions and antagonisms among men. In its hierarchical sense, the celibate brotherhood further transcends the natural bonds of marriage and procreation. This hierarchical brotherhood also images Christ’s relation to his Apostles in the diocesan presbyterate under its bishop and in the episcopate under the Holy Father. There is a brotherhood of priests and brotherhood of bishops. It is a brotherhood whose members are “at peace and in communion” with each other. This ecclesial model of fraternal love is not an aberration but a sanctified template for the shaping of public life in its civic forms of city and nation.
De Lubac begins The Splendor of the Church with a discussion of mystery and ends it with a discussion of Mary. Maria, anima, and ecclesia all share deep connections which exemplify the feminine, the interior, and the mysterious. De Lubac draws from the Fathers the principle that whatever may be said of the Church may be said likewise of Mary. They are thus both “the meeting place of all mysteries,” or rather the mystery of Mary is continued and deepened in the Church’s mystery. The depth of the Marian and ecclesial mystery continues, however, in the soul, for it is in the soul that this same mystery is reproduced and “is consummated by being interiorized.” The deep mystery exemplified in the feminine interiority is to be treated with great reverence. For this reason, de Lubac notes that “mystery is something that is fitly believed in obscurity, something to be meditated in silence... something [we] simply want to adore...” While Mary is no “Catholic goddess” and, contrary to panentheists like Matthew Fox, God is not “Mother”, it may be fruitful to understand the feminine character of the Church, Mary, and the soul as manifestations of the interior. When we look for this feminine principle of interiority in God, this is not expressed in any of the Persons in the Trinity or divine actions as such. Instead, is it not possible that we are being pointed towards that sacred mystery at God’s innermost depths which is ineffable?
Conclusion: The Contribution of Henri de Lubac
Henri de Lubac confronted the high tide of a confident, armed atheism which had put itself forward as the champion and proponent of human unity. His response took seriously the atheist humanist criticisms of post-Reformation Christianity. The theological counterstroke that followed meant both a return to the Fathers and the Church’s Tradition regarding nature and the supernatural as well as a rejection of the individualism which stemmed from Protestant soteriology. Man has one supernatural end and he must arrive at this end as one corporate body. This did not mean that “all are saved or none are saved”. Christ became the centerpiece of his argument. Atomized by sin, the human race must be redeemed and reconstituted in the New Adam. For de Lubac, the atheist humanist who ties man to the physical laws of nature, rather than the divine law and the incarnate Christ, only ties him to those physical forces which will inevitably lead to the universe’s death. Every physicist knows that mankind and the earth as a viable planet will not be here in a few billion years. We are in a life and death struggle that encompasses both matter and spirit. If we depend only on matter, the laws of nature are relentlessly against us in the long term. Man’s only hope to escape an ultimate death is to corporately bind himself to the living Christ in his Mystical Body, the Church. Atheistic humanism bound humanity together in a death clasp— yet that formulation seemed more heroic than the Christian narrative of escaping to eternal safety one coward at a time. De Lubac’s Catholic vision of man was of man as a whole. He says yes to the atheistic humanists that we humans are tied together but not in a death clasp waiting for a meteor to hit or the heat from an expanding Sun to end our sorry tale. Humanity is drawn together in the Church as a corporate Body so we experience our common destiny which will surpass the limiting laws of matter and space. Our common destiny is eternal life in Christ.
A. Joseph Lynch is a teacher and catechist in Kansas City. He writes a weekly post for the Anthropology of Accord, is editor of the blog's Religion and Geopolitics Review, and has been published in Crisis Magazine.