Surnaturel

In his 1993 book, The Dynamics of Grace , Stephen J. Duffy offers a superb brief summary of de Lubac’s thesis in Surnaturel .

According to de Lubac’s history, “Neither the Fathers nor the great schoolmen ever considered a purely natural human destiny a possibility. Their focus was on one, sole order: the concrete order of grace in which humans were made for God and human nature could be intelligible only by reason of its finality, diviniation.” There were developments: Aquinas’s notion of a “natural desire” for God was an Aristotelian version of a theme first enunciated by Augustine, the cor inquietam . But Aquinas was in strong continuity with the Fathers.

This unified vision “unraveled” in the sixteenth century. Cajetan claimed that the notion of a natural desire for God was a “theological” rather than a “philosophical” opinion, and argued that “Thomas saw the desire simply as a response to God’s revelation calling humans to a supernatural finality.” Following this suggestion, later sixteenth and seventeenth century theologians invoked a “state of pure nature” according to which “humans could possibly be created with a goal proportioned to their natural powers and not called to beatific vision.” De Lubac charged that this amounted to a “‘materialization’ of created spirit” that limited human desire and human existence by metaphysical law. By the nineteenth century, this vision “had solified and become a wedge driven between the natural and the supernatural” and by the twentieth century had become so entrenched than any questioning of it was viewed as a threat to the gratuity of grace.

What are the consequences of this view? Duffy offers this neat summary: “the ‘supernatural’ was a miraculous gift appended to nature . . . . The supernatural was accessible only by revelation; the natural could be known by unaided reason. Indeed some held that just as one might place a variety oc caps on a bottle, all of which leave the bottle unchanged, so too no matter what destiny was assigned to human nature, ‘natural realities would perdure just as they are now.’ The natural and supernatural orders are only extrinsically and juridically linked by divine decree. This dualism led to splitting the study of human being in two; philosophical anthropology goes on its own way in disregard of theology. No longer is desire for God central to anthropology. Theology’s stress on what human nature can do relying on its own resources opened a door to secularized construals of existence and the supernatural became increasingly foreign. Pure natural, a hypothetical possibility, was becoming a historical reality . . . . Nature and supernature were paired off ad the latter was seen as an adornment of the former, a rather superfluous add-on to a system already integral and complete in itself. ‘Christianity took on an artificial character and the bread of doctrine was presented as a stone.’ The theologians, not the philosophers, were the villains in the piece. They were the ones who cordoned off and isolated the supernatural. On the intellectual labors of reason it must not cast even its shadow, not a hint of its presence of possibility. Any rational reflection allowing the slightest opening of the human spirit to the absolute mystery had to be illusory. No wonder religion and culture were estranged.”

Thomas, de Lubac claimed, maintained two propositions in proper tension: Human beings have a natural desire to enjoy the vision of God, and this natural desire is only fulfilled by an act of pure grace on God’s part. The natural desire does not in any way obligate God to fulfill it, though because there is a natural desire the gift of supernatural grace “fits” with man as created, and is not an extraneous gift. Later scholasticism failed to maintain this tension, and the notion of a natural desire for God was quaified out of existence.

Thomas is not wholly free from culpability for this development: “The tension, bordering on contradiction between the patristic notion of human being as image of God and the Aristotelian classification of it as a ‘nature’ is a recurrent motif in Surnaturel . Human being as image of God is meant to drow into the likeness of God in vision of the divine glory. This patristic position was rooted in ‘the essential differences between the beings of nature, whose diverse ends are proportioned to their diverse natures, and the spirit, which is open to the infinite.’ Whereas the Fathers distinguished human spirit and nature, with Aristotle one could speak of human being as one did of everything else, viz., as being a nature, a principle of operation with a defined and limited set of powers. Thus the ‘nature’ to which Thomas refers, argued de Lubac, even though spiritual, does not differ essentially from other natures. It was ‘philosophical’ nature as conceived by the Ancients, who did not speak of a Creator God. No longer was it the image of God as understood by the Fathers, whose climate was ‘mystery’ and who were less taken by Plato than by Scripture . . . . For the Fathers there is no nous [mind] without an anticipatory sharing, gratuitous and precarious as it is, in the one pneuma . For Aristotle, nature, as a center of properties and source of strictly deliminted activity, is locked up, sealed off in its own order. In Thomas, the Aristotelean and patristic conceptions of nature uncomfortably lie side by side and uneasily intermingle in unresolved tension. Ambiguity dogs the interpreter, for Thomas did not always succeed in harmonizing the two.”

Thus, the “Aristotelean transposition of the patristic heritage” in Thomas “paved the way for later misrepresentations of his thought by those paleo-Thomists who betrayed the nourishing soil of the tradition with their over-rationalized theology.” A natural desire that could only be fulfilled supernaturally posed a dilemma: “how could the natural desire stretch toward the vision of God without scuttling the gratuity of the supernatural? A truly natural desire could not be merely a response to the divine invitation, the human flip-side of the divine side . . . with its call to union.” The problem does not come from saying that man has a natural desire for God, but from the Aristotelian conception of nature that is already at work here: “Thomas transformed Augustinianism and ended by allowing an autonomous philosophy to take up residence in the Christian house of intellect . . . . In time his position came to be read as menacing orthodoxy and provoking the extrinicism that sealed off the supernatural from nature and welcomed in all the demons of dualism that have come to haunt the Catholic household.”

In short, Surnaturel is an extended argument that ‘pure nature’ is one of those expendable concepts. Once thought to be a helpful heuristic, it gradually introduced havoc-wreaking dualistic distortions that ceded the world to secularism. The extrinsicists’ dualism imagined that it was opposing naturalism and exalting the transcendence of the supernatural. In fact, it became the unwitting ally of naturalism and secularism; it banished the supernatural to splendid isolation. Christianity thus became marginal to culture’s life.”