Florilegium of de Lubac

Florilegium of de Lubac March 6, 2012

A morning’s harvest from the de Lubac garden.

“Under the opposition of the letter and the spirit, or of the shadow and the truth, in its varied and sometimes, for us, paradoxical expressions, there is always the opposition of two peoples, of two ages, of two regimes, of two states of faith, of two ‘economies,’ which is affirmed. There are two peoples, two ages, two states, two regimes, two economies, which, however, are opposed to each other in a real contradiction properly speaking only once they have come to coexist, the first not having wished to disappear on the arrival of the one for which its whole task was to prepare, because it had not understood that it was merely the means of getting ready for it.”

On the difference of Christian and Greek allegory: “Where would one find in the facts of history, or only in the thought of the imagination of the Greek allegorists, the irruption of some ‘new testament’ analogous to that of the Christians, an iruption which one day would have turned the ancient exegesis of the Homeric poems upside-down by overturning the very being of their exegete? Where would one find, in Cornutus and the rest, anything even remotely resembling the opposition between the oldness of the letter and the newness of the spirit?”


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