Margetekst
“Our natural desire for God entails a renunciation both of self-sufficiency and of demand. To want a gratuitous friendship is also to want to be surprised, and so to refuse to know in advance the actual shape of that gratuity.”
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A number of recent publications have brought new life to the debate surrounding Henri de Lubac’s writings on nature and grace. At issue in this seemingly “academic” question is the novelty and gratuity of Jesus Christ in relation to creation. Embedded in the question of how Christ’s novelty relates to the order of creation is a set of further issues concerning the relationship between the Church and the world, the relationship between theology and philosophy, the ecclesial and cosmological significance of the Eucharist, and the meaning of the universality of Christ’s saving mission. For some, de Lubac’s account of these matters represents a recovery of the breadth and depth of the authentic Catholic tradition, a renewal of the vision of Christian humanism that unites patristic and high medieval thought and that informed the documents of the Second Vatican Council. For others, de Lubac’s writings on nature and grace represent a “distortion of the Thomist legacy” that has “influenced for the worse a large percentage of Catholic theologians and philosophers trained since the Second World War” and “contributed to the destabilization of Catholic theology.” Because de Lubac and his interlocutors both claim to be faithfully interpreting Thomas Aquinas, much of the debate has focused on the meaning of texts in Aquinas on the desiderium naturale visionis dei as well as related texts on the “twofold beatitude” proper to human nature.
Since the publication of Surnaturel in 1946, the sharpest and most significant criticisms of de Lubac’s theological anthropology have been articulated by Thomists who fear that he has compromised the gratuity of grace. “The great difficulty with [de Lubac’s] position,” observes Lawrence Feingold, “lies in showing how grace and the beatific vision are not due to a nature which is destined to this end in virtue of the innate desire for it implanted in the nature itself.” In his own recent study, The Natural Desire to See God According to St. Thomas Aquinas and His Interpreters (Rome: Apollinare Studi, 2001) [forthcoming with Sapientia Press, 2010], Feingold presents a large-scale development of this point supported by a meticulous collation of texts and arguments from Aquinas and the commentatorial tradition. In 2007, the English-language edition of Nova et Vetera published several articles in support of Feingold’s thesis. Essays by Reinhard Hütter and Steven Long extend Feingold’s argument by situating his critique of de Lubac within a larger set of issues bearing on the nature and method of theology, the relationship between philosophy and theology, the doctrine of predestination, and the loss of natural teleology in modern thought.
