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.

Reflections on Steven Long's "Natura Pura"

Andrew Greenwell (of the blog Lex Christianorum) has been reading Steven Long and offers a number of posts on Steven Long's Natura Pura: On the Recovery of Nature in the Doctrine of Grace (Fordham UP, 2010):

• Natura Pura: Human Nature Unaided (02/16/11):

  Grace presupposes nature, and perfection supposes something that can be perfected."* So succinctly does St. Thomas distinguish grace and human nature so as to immediately recombine them. But there is a marked tendency among some contemporary theologians, those of la nouvelle théologie, to so emphasize grace as to virtually negate any meaning in the notion of human nature. Ultimately, this tendency is derived from a notion of "nature" which is bereft of any theonomic character,** and one far less ontologically dense than what St. Thomas had in mind by the concept of "nature." ...

• Natura Pura: Misunderstanding St. Thomas: Source Texts (02/17/11):

  Renaissance or Cajetanian corruptions to the genuine teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas is how the Jesuit theologian Henri de Lubac interpreted the received Thomistic teaching on human nature and divine grace. In fact, it was not Renaissance or Cajetanian corruptions in the received teaching, but the "modern presumptions" in de Lubac's notions of nature that steered him wrong. ...

• Natura Pura: St. Thomas in a Nutshell, Part I (02/18/11).

• Natura Pura: St. Thomas in a Nutshell, Part II (02/19/11).

• Balaam's Ass and Stained Glass: The Concept of Specific Obediential Potency:

  The notion of obendiential potency is a central concept to traditional Christian anthropology. Man's nature--that which defines him specifically--is in potency to supernatural grace, a potency which is actualized by the obedience of faith and all such obedience of faith entails (e.g., baptism). De Lubac appears to have limited his notion of obediential potency as "susceptibility to miracle," which is one manner in which the term was used by scholastics, including St. Thomas himself. But de Lubac seems to disregard, nay, in fact reject,* the concept in its other sense, that is as the conceptual carrier for "the fundamental question of the relation of nature to grace." Long, 28. (In this latter sense, to distinguish it from its former generic sense, it is often called "specific obediential potency.") According to Long, the same tendentiousness is found in the Thomist Etienne Gilson for whom the concept of obediential potency "was tantamount to the idea of a mere extrinsic and miraculous transmutation of nature." Long, 28.

  Restricted to the sense of susceptability to miracle, the concept of "obediential potentiality" is clearly deficient to explain the relationship between human nature and the supernatural life. There is a huge difference between Balaam's ass speaking (a miraculous transmutation of asinine nature) and man's capax Dei, his natural capacity to be receptive to, and elevated by the divine aid and "speak in tongues" so to speak. If kept to this denotation alone, it is an inadequate carrier of that relationship. If man were transmuted by grace, he would no longer be man. If man was not man until he was transmuted by grace, then he would not have been man before. But what is remarkable is the rejection of both Gilson and de Lubac of the term "obediential potency" as the concept of man's passive receptivity to divine grace. It was as if these two greats had never read St. Thomas!

• The Plunder of Nature: Outside and Inside the Household (02/22/11).

• Toward a Recapture of Nature in its Fullness (02/23/11).

• Balthasar's Theological Vacuole, Part I (02/25/11). "Even the redoubtable Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar,* unquestionably one of the great Catholic theologians of the 20th century, shared in de Lubac's error on the distinction between nature and grace."

• Balthasar's Theological Vacuole, Part II (02/26/11).
• Balthasar's Theological Vacuole, Part III (02/27/11). "There is a tendency towards reductionism of nature in Hans Urs von Balthasar's understanding of nature within the greater question the nature/supernature complex."

• Balthasar's Theological Vacuole, Part IV (02/28/11). "Hans Urs von Balthasar appears to have been convinced that the concept of pure nature had to be abandoned as an inadequate theological concept. In his book on the theology of Karl Barth, he sets forth his understanding of the Catholic position on the nature/supernature complex, but his understanding of it appears to deviate from the inherited Thomistic synthesis."

• Balthasar's Theological Vacuole, Part V (03/01/11). Balthasar ranks himself within the historical range of prior efforts at defining the relationship between nature and grace. He views himself as a within the moderate wing, but what is really telling is that he puts the traditional Thomistic teaching at the extreme."

• Pura Natura Persona Non Grata Est: Unwanted Nature (03/02/11).

Steven Long: "Natura Pura: On the Recovery of Nature in the Doctrine of Grace"

Natura Pura: On the Recovery of Nature in the Doctrine of Grace (Moral Philosophy and Moral Theology)
by Steven Long.
Fordham University Press; 1 edition (April 28, 2010).

From speculative theology to the exegesis of Aquinas, to contemporary North American philosophy and Catholic social and ethical thought, to the thought of Benedict XVI, this work argues the crucial importance of the proportionate natural end within the context of grace and supernatural beatitude. Long argues that, in the effort to avoid naturalism, Henri de Lubac unwittingly consummated the loss of nature as a normative principle within theology, both doctrinally and exegetically with respect to the teaching of Aquinas. The author argues that this constitutes an understandable but grave error. De Lubac's view of the matter was adopted and extended by Hans Urs von Balthasar in The Theology of Karl Barth, in which Balthasar argues that Aquinas could not even consider pure nature because it was impossible for him even to make the conceptual distinction implied by this problem,a view contradicted by Aquinas's text. Long argues that in The Theology of Karl Barth, Balthasar's account evacuates nature of its specific ontological density and treats it as mere createdness as such,a kind of dimensionless point terminating the line of grace. Given the loss of natura within theological method, its recovery requires philosophic instrumentalities. In its third chapter this book argues that by reason of its lack of any unified philosophy of nature or metaphysics, the analytic thought so widespread in Anglophone circles is merely a partial metaphilosophy and so cannot replace the role of classical Thomism within theology. The fourth chapter argues against those who construe affirmation of a proportionate natural end as equivalent to social Pelagianism or minimalism in the public square, engaging the work of Jacques Maritain, Jean Porter, and David Schindler, Sr. In an appendix, the author examines the early thought of Cardinal Ratzinger / Pope Benedict XVI, and its development toward the Regensburg Lecture.

Reviews

• Mansini, Guy. Review: Natura Pura: On the Recovery of Nature in the Doctrine of Grace. The Thomist Vol. 74 (2010).
• Boersma, G., Review: Natura Pura: On the Recovery of Nature in the Doctrine of Grace by Steven A. Long. New Blackfriars, 93: 117–119. (2012).
• "Natura Pura: Two Recent Works", by Thomas Osborne, Jr. Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 11, No. 1 (2013).
• Whapham, T.J., Review: Natura Pura: On the Recovery of Nature in the Doctrine of Grace by Steven A. Long. Irish Theological Quarterly August 2011 vol. 76 no. 3.