Steven A. Long on De Lubac: a theological instance of "destroying the village in order to save it"

What was to be Henri de Lubac’s response to the distinction of nature from grace as it functioned within the anomalous context of the exile of God from the natural world and from the nature of human agency? Reading the de Lubac of The Drama of Atheist Humanism, it becomes perfectly clear that he was well acquainted with anti-theism and the banishing of God from history through the unreasoning exaltation of matter, or will, or reason. He was also intimately aware of the dilemma of human freedom in a world that, like a mausoleum, enclosed its inhabitants in a lofty and impenetrable solitude or, alternately, offered release solely through alienating extroversion. To a Christian man of such profound vision and cultural sensitivity as well as historical awareness, it cannot have been other than ravishingly tempting utterly to contradict the naturalist reduction with one working in a different and Christian direction, asserting a natural desire for intrinsically supernatural beatitude. The dynamism of man himself would be taken not only as pointed ad Deum but as aspirationally projected within the Triune life of God Himself. Neither positivism nor scientism nor any of the other "isms" seeking to confine man within the terrestrial cage and to reduce the human mystery to a problem of naturalist flow-dynamics would gain any purchase over this starting point for the Christian apologetic, for this apologetic would be nothing other than the answer to the question: "What is man?"

In the face of such crushing cultural, ideological, and philosophic adversity, the distinctions contemplated and honed within baroque scholasticism—that revelation reveals man to himself with respect to his deeper destiny in grace, but not primarily or properly with respect to human nature as such (of which one has connatural awareness and potential natural wisdom) but rather medicinally — could hardly seem decisive. Against the anti - theists—Marx, Nietzsche, and the rest — de Lubac would rely upon teleology. Almost alone amidst contemporaries for whom teleology defined nothing, de Lubac would overstress teleology, making of the finis ultimus of intrinsically supernatural beatific vision the very natural end of man, and denying that human nature is placed in its species — as Aquinas expressly asserts that it is — by its natural and proportionate end as distinct from the supernatural beatific end.

The convergent implication of secular and Molinist thought seems indeed to be the loss of nature and natural order as theonomic principles, and the loss of natural law as nothing else than a participation of eternal law. Once this theonomic character of natural order and natural law are lost, then sustaining the distinction of nature and grace simply formalizes the boundaries consequent upon the loss of God. One may say safely, from this repose of distance in time, that de Lubac was correct in seeking the answer in teleology, and correct again in seeking an answer that would once more establish the theonomic character of natural order. While he was incorrect in supposing that natural teleology in itself could be shoehorned into or equated with a supernatural trajectory, it was precisely his instinct that the theonomic character of nature needed to be preserved that led him to attempt this defense in a manner that unwittingly falsifies nature itself. This turning of nature into a vacuole fit only for supernatural beatitude even apart from grace and revelation paradoxically completed the ontological evacuation of nature to which de Lubac was in part responding. Perhaps this is the clearest theological instance of "destroying the village in order to save it," but it still does not constitute a sufficient answer to the negation of the theonomic character of natural law and, more widely, of natural order. It also manifests a lack of that radical providentialist trust in the specifically natural that demarcates the theological vision of St. Thomas from those who are prone to assume that the natural in its own right must be a zone without the divine governance, and so needing to be as theologically minimized as possible. That is, it manifests despair in seeking to re-achieve the theonomic character of natural order by draining the natural of its own distinctive finality and intelligibility. It is not the first time that a physician unintentionally has communicated the plague he nobly sought to resist.

-- Steven A. Long, Natura Pura: On the Recovery of Nature in the Doctrine of Grace (Fordham UP, 2010) pp. 42-44.