Eric Voegelin and Henri de Lubac: The Metaxy and the Suspended Middle (Part I)

Two Twentieth Century Theologians: Recovering the Experiences That Engendered the Symbols of Western Order

Professor Eric Voegelin (1901-1985) and Father Henri de Lubac (1896-1991) had much in common, beyond the fact that their lives overlapped. Both men were not only concerned with, but had been personally affected by, the mass ideological movements of the twentieth century. Both men were profound thinkers, who analyzed the problems of order and disorder not on the level of institutional arrangements, but down to their spiritual roots. And each man, in a different way, was accused of adopting a heterodox approach to Christianity. Indeed, some believed that de Lubac had committed heresy, and others would have accused Voegelin of heresy had they been able to pigeonhole him in a confessional denomination in the first place.

There were, of course, differences between them, as could be expected, given that one was a Professor who gave little hint of his own “religion,” if one may even use that term in connection with Voegelin, and the other was a Priest, and later a Cardinal, of the Catholic Church. One major difference was in their approaches to the Person of Christ. Voegelin, as is well known, has been criticized by Christians who otherwise would have embraced him warmly but for the fact that he was readier to talk about “The Pauline Vision of the Resurrected” than the Resurrected.[i] However, and somewhat ironically given de Lubac’s position within the Church, de Lubac agreed with Voegelin that substantial blame for the breakdown of personal and political order in their time, which is still our time, lay with certain developments in Christian theology [ii] when the Church was the great ordering force of the West.

At the very center of the work of each man was an effort to retrieve the experiences of consciousness of transcendence that gave rise to the fundamental symbols of Western order – of faith and reason, revelation and reason, theology and philosophy, Jerusalem and Athens – and to find, in the context of their time, adequate ways to publicly convey these experiences. The experiences form the substance of order, both personal and political, and their eclipse leads to disorder. The fundamental symbols of this order, in their classical and Judeo-Christian forms, historically separated from their engendering experiences in the divine-human encounter through the process of “doctrinilization.” They thus became opaque, as Voegelin would say, as mere propositions, and then were eclipsed by the symbols created by the ideologies which replaced them, which themselves were parasitic on the symbols that they replaced. Against the dead symbols, ideology at least promised fulfillment, albeit in a purely immanent sense.

And so Voegelin and de Lubac had to deal not just with the “negative” type of atheism that is a constant in human history, but with an “affirmative” atheism that was really anti-theistic and anti-Christian on purportedly “moral” grounds, if one may use that expression in this context. Voegelin expressed this relatively early in his career by referring to ideology as the “re-divinization” of the temporal order, [iii] and later in his career by referring to “the magic of the extreme,” a term he borrowed from Nietzsche.[iv] Similarly, de Lubac said, “Contemporary atheism is increasingly positive, organic, constructive.”[v] The ideological symbols, each man would say, rushed in to fill the vacuum left by the doctrinilization of the genuine symbols of order. And each man expressed deep concern that certain derailments in Christian theology – both in the doctrinalization of Christian truth, and in the direction the derailments had pointed –had significantly contributed to this process.

De Lubac sounded the alarm at the beginning of his The Drama of Atheist Humanism: “Beneath the numerous surface-currents which carry contemporary thought in every direction, it seems possible to detect a deep undercurrent, by no means new – or rather a sort of immense drift; through the action of a large proportion of its foremost thinkers, the peoples of the West are denying their Christian past and turning away from God.”[vi] When de Lubac wrote this, in 1950, it was certainly truer of Europe than of the United States. Now it may be equally true for both.

De Lubac distinguished three types of atheism. The first is “the everyday type of atheism which crops up in all ages and is of no particular significance.”[vii] The second is “the purely critical atheism so fashionable in the last two hundred years . . . [which] does not represent a living force, since it is manifestly incapable of replacing what it destroys—its only function being to hollow out a channel for that other atheism which is my real subject.”[viii] The third type of atheism, “contemporary atheism” – de Lubac’s “real subject” – “is increasingly positive, organic, constructive. Combining a mystical immanentism with a clear perception of the human trend, it has three principal aspects, which can be symbolized by three names . . .”[ix] The names are Auguste Comte, the founder of positivism; Ludwig Feuerbach,[x] whose psychology of “projection” had, and has, a powerful influence, “who must share the honour with his disciple, Karl Marx”; and Friedrich Nietzsche, who rejected Christianity because it is based on the alleged resentment by the weak of the strong. “The negation which underlies positivist humanism, Marxist humanism and Nietzschean humanism is not so much atheism, in the strict sense of the word, as antitheism, or, more precisely, antichristianism. Great as the contrast is between them, their common foundation in the rejection of God is matched by a certain similarity in results, the chief of which is the annihilation of the human person.”[xi]

But there is a “hero” in the dramatic story de Lubac tells:

“Yet the sun did not cease to rise! Marx was not yet dead, and Nietzsche had not yet written his most searing books, when another man, another disturbing but more truly prophetic genius, announced the victory of God in the human soul, and his eternal resurrection.”

“Dostoevsky was only a novelist. He originated no system, he supplied no solution for the terrible problems with which our age is confronted in its efforts to organize social life. But he made one profoundly social truth clear: man cannot organize the world for himself without God; without God he can only organize the world against man. Exclusive humanism is inhuman humanism. Moreover, it is not the purpose of faith in God to install us comfortably in our earthly life that we many go to sleep in it. On the contrary, faith disturbs us and continually upsets the too beautiful balance of our mental conceptions and our social structures. Bursting into a world that perpetually tends to close in upon itself, God brings it the possibility of a harmony which is certainly superior, but is to be attained only at the cost of a series of cleavages and struggles coextensive with time itself. “I came not to bring peace, but a sword.” Christ is, first and foremost, the great disturber. That certainly does not mean that the Church lacks a social doctrine, derived from the Gospel. Still less does it tend to deter Christians, who, like their brothers, are men and members of the city, from seeking to solve the city’s problems in accordance with the principles of their faith; on the contrary, it is one more necessity impelling them to do so. But they know at the same time that, the destiny of man being eternal, he is not meant to find ultimate repose here below.”[xii]

“Thus is the relationship between spirituality and politics rightly conceived and expressed.”[xiii]

And so both Voegelin, the political philosopher, and de Lubac, the theologian, had to, in effect, “dig their way out” from under the massive build-up of not only doctrinalized symbols, but ideological symbols as well. Along these lines, we note that Father, later Cardinal, Henri de Lubac, S.J. was of course always a theologian. Voegelin may have “begun” his career as a political scientist, but he “finished” as a theologian. Given that modern politics has to a greater or lesser extent “replaced” religion, no student of politics today can ignore theology. Many in my generation who started out with religion, turned to politics instead for a meaning that is not to be found there. One of the most insightful commentators on Voegelin, Michael Morrissey, has shown that Voegelin was as much theologian as political scientist or political philosopher.[xiv] Morrissey says that Voegelin in effect dissolved the distinction between philosophy and theology:

“The basic contention of this study is that Voegelin’s monumental work, especially his later writings, is as germane to theology as it is to philosophy and political science. . . . Indeed, of no other contemporary thinker could one say as unhesitatingly that the distinction between philosophy and theology, for all practical and theoretical purposes, virtually disappears. I believe Voegelin’s entire philosophical enterprise is actually a veiled reconstruction of theology that I think theologians have by and large yet to recognize. In the name of philosophy Voegelin has reproached and renewed, rebuked and rebuilt, theology. . . . by successfully annexing faith and reason, reason and revelation, philosophy and theology, Athens and Jerusalem, in a critical theory of consciousness, he has reconstructed the authentic foundations of theology. . .”[xv]

This characteristic of Voegelin distinguishes him from de Lubac. If in Voegelin “the distinction between philosophy and theology, for all practical and theoretical purposes, virtually disappears,” the distinction is maintained by de Lubac, and generally by the Church. As Morrissey suggests, the Church might well benefit by more of an exposure to Voegelin.[xvi]

One of Voegelin’s central symbols is the “metaxy,” that is, the “In-Between” of human existence, derived by Voegelin from the speech Socrates puts into the mouth of Diotima in Plato’s Symposium.[xvii] The metaxy is one of the most powerful and evocative symbols I have ever encountered to describe what it really feels like to be human, living in time, longing for the timeless. And the first time I became aware of some similarity between Voegelin and de Lubac, beyond my familiarity with The New Science of Politics and The Drama of Atheist Humanism, was when I picked up a book written by John Milbank called The Suspended Middle: Henri de Lubac and the Debate Concerning the Supernatural.[xviii] What struck me about the “Suspended Middle,” just on the surface of the expression, was its similarity to the metaxy.[xix]

It was another great twentieth century Catholic theologian, Hans Urs von Balthasar, who had created the term “suspended middle” with reference to de Lubac. Von Balthasar used the term to describe the position de Lubac was in after the publication in 1946 of his Surnaturel, something of a theological “bombshell” which had gotten de Lubac into plenty of trouble within, if not exactly with, the Catholic Church.[xx] In describing that position, von Balthasar said: “De Lubac soon realized that his position moved into a suspended middle in which he could not practice any philosophy without its transcendence into theology, but also no theology without its essential inner substructure of philosophy. This center has been the vital environment of his thought from the beginning to the present, at the beginning in opposition to the modern dichotomy that Cajetan had projected into Thomas, today in opposition to a new form of Christian schizophrenia that yields so much to post-Kantian scientific rationalism and secularism (as ‘opening to the world’) that the only thing left for the sphere of faith is a groundless fideism.”[xxi]

To expand a bit upon this, “the modern dichotomy” to which von Balthasar refers, and against which de Lubac wrote, is the dichotomy between the natural and the supernatural realms “projected” by certain Catholic theologians, Cajetan a principal among them,[xxii] into Thomas Aquinas, recognized, together with St. Augustine, as the most important of all Catholic theologians. According to de Lubac’s reading of him, for Aquinas, there was only one final end for man, a supernatural end, namely, the Beatific Vision, in which man would see God face-to-face through grace in death. Only in this end could man find the end of all of his desiring, and so come to rest at last.[xxiii] De Lubac could invoke Scripture in support of his position: “Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after out likeness . . . So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.”[xxiv] De Lubac could also invoke Augustine at the beginning of the Confessions: “You awake us to delight in Your praise; for You made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.”[xxv] And at the end: “. . . we hope to rest in Your great hallowing.”[xxvi]

To flesh out this Christian conception of the relationship between nature and supernature, Maurice Blondel (1861-1949), a great influence on de Lubac, noted that the relationship was more than merely “intellectual”:

“The supernatural does not consist solely in a vision or an intuition, however speculative, however possessive of being; it also, and above all, consists in a marvelous relationship of love, in the deific adoption which in a sense turns the metaphysical order upside down, though without destroying it, the relationship that must come into being between Creator and creature in order that the creature, a slave, be brought into the inner life of the Trinity as a son. One might have an infinite wish to know the infinite fully without ever desiring, without ever suspecting this “inebriation,” this “madness,” which is of another order altogether from intellection.”[xxvii]

Cajetan, in contrast, read Aquinas as positing two final ends for man, one natural, which became known as the realm of “pure nature,” and the other supernatural. In that way, thought Cajetan, the “gratuitousness” of the order of grace was preserved, since God was not obligated, and could not be compelled, to provide man with a fulfillment beyond his nature. Human nature could find fulfillment in the only realm in which, in the order of justice, it deserved to find it, the natural realm. If God chose to raise man, or certain men, to the supernatural realm through His gift of grace, well, that was all up to Him. De Lubac thought that in this metaphysical structure, such relationship as there remained between the natural and the supernatural became vague, to the point where it ceased to engage human interest, and in effect disappeared.

This “dualism,” de Lubac would say, destroyed the unity of the human person, preserved in Aquinas as fundamentally oriented towards the supernatural, with certain disastrous consequences, including, as von Balthasar points out, rationalism and secularism with regard to the natural realm, and “a groundless fideism” with regard to the supernatural realm. The natural realm was cut off from transcendence, from the supernatural. Since transcendence, that for which the human person most longs, simply does not go away, but will pop up in one place if it is repressed in another, the realm of “pure nature” “created” by Cajetan and others, expanding with the civilizational accomplishments that brought about our modern world, eventually came to absorb the transcendence.[xxviii]

Voegelin called this the “re-divinization” of the temporal. De Lubac described it as the triumph of anti-theism. In either case, the transcendent is no longer conceived as God’s gift through grace in death, but as the perfect (utopian), or at least more perfect (progressivist), realm, to be realized in time through the “inevitable” historical forces of “progress,” through human power, etc. This formed, for de Lubac as well as for Voegelin, the context of the specifically modern problems of politics. The most important realm of being is lost, or, rather, misplaced. Reality contracts to the material. Science in the classic sense is reduced to natural science, and only what natural science can study is declared real.[xxix] Politics ceases to be the arena for human action in which all of the virtues, especially prudence, can be exercised. Instead, modern politics begins with the denial of limits to human nature and politics, with the recognition of which prudence begins. Worship is transferred from the divine to the human. We have no God but Caesar. As in the century in which Voegelin and de Lubac wrote, so in this century, politics, which has become an ersatz form of religion, represents the greatest threat to a real spirituality. We have lost the sense of a real spirituality—our politics has taken its place, has “absorbed” it. We look to our political leaders for “fundamental transformation,” not to grace.

De Lubac’s commentary on the derailment of Christian theology by Neoscholasticism, which will form the bulk of this paper, forms an absorbing study which bears comparison with Voegelin’s much more sweeping study of the history of the language symbols that convey the experiential sources of Western order generally, and their derailments. And de Lubac’s study of atheist humanism, which formed in the wake of these derailments, also bears comparison with Voegelin’s study of modern political ideologies. Much could be written about Voegelin and de Lubac. They were not only profound thinkers, but prolific authors who wrote on a variety of subjects. The interests they have in common which have most engaged my attention have been their “philosophies of consciousness,” which involve the examination of basic human experiences; their concerns about developments in the history of Christian theology; their concerns about modern atheism and modern political ideologies; and their studies of how ideology in effect replaced religion. This paper will concentrate primarily on de Lubac’s view of Christian theology and its derailments as expressed in his “twin” books on the subject, Augustinianism and Modern Theology and The Mystery of the Supernatural, with references to Voegelin thrown in where they seem relevant.[xxx]

I have mentioned the fact that Metaxy, Voegelin’s symbol, and “Suspended Middle,” a symbol applied to the work of de Lubac, are both evocative of the same fundamental human experience. But Voegelin and de Lubac have in common another word used to describe this experience. That word is “paradox.” It appears throughout the work of both men.[xxxi] It expresses, as de Lubac puts it, the fact that man is the creature whose most basic desire is a natural desire for the supernatural, that is, a natural longing for something that he himself does not have the natural power to obtain. The human person is this paradox. Man is a piece of nature oriented toward something beyond nature. He is the only part of nature so oriented. Many of the problems that developed in the creation of language symbols to adequately express the experience of being human in this sense, especially in the history of Christian theology, are a function of the fact that what they attempt to describe is paradoxical. Voegelin recognized the same problem. Paradox, being close to contradiction, but actually holding two opposing truths in tension, preserves mystery—as in, “Man is made in the image and likeness of God.”[xxxii]

If Voegelin, an outsider, was critical of the Church, de Lubac, an insider, outdid him along those lines. Indeed, as Bryan C. Hollon put it in Everything Is Sacred: Spiritual Exegesis in the Political Theology of Henri de Lubac, de Lubac could be excoriating on the subject:

“According to Henri de Lubac, the Catholic Church was at least partly responsible for its own increasing marginalization. . . . Although beginning with Leo XIII, the Catholic Church had made a concerted effort to influence the direction of European civilization, it was increasingly difficult, especially for laypersons, to understand how the Catholic faith had anything particularly distinctive to contribute to social and political life.”

According to de Lubac, “the error,” for the theologian “consists in conceiving of dogma as a kind of ‘thing in itself,’ as a block of revealed truth with no relationship whatsoever to natural man.” He believed that Thomistic philosophy had become so specialized and “scientific” that the profoundly humanistic nature of Christian faith was largely unintelligible for the average Catholic citizen.

In a later article, written during the Second World War, de Lubac compared neoscholastic theology to museum work, suggesting that neoscholastic theologians:

“stroll about theology somewhat as if in a museum of which we are the curators, a museum where we have inventoried, arranged and labeled everything; we know how to define all the terms, we have an answer for all objections, we supply the desired distinctions at just the right moment. Everything in it is obscure for the secular, but for us, everything is clear, everything is explained. If there is still a mystery, at least we know exactly where it is to be placed, and we point to this precisely defined site. . . Thus, for us, theology is a science a bit like the others, with this sole essential difference: its first principles were received through revelation instead of having been acquired through experience or through the work of reason.”

With regard to apologetics, de Lubac claimed that Catholic apologists were captivated by “a kind of unavowed rationalism, which had been reinforced for a century by the invasion of positivist tendencies.”[xxxiii]

According to de Lubac, “‘[T]he apologist’ during the heyday of neoscholasticism. . . offer[ed] a justification of the Christian faith by means of rational, and purely extrinsic, epistemological argumentation.”[xxxiv] De Lubac declared, “At the heart of the issue is the question of whether or not Christian theology has something meaningful to say to the human condition. De Lubac believed that neoscholastic theologians had turned ‘dogma into a kind of “superstructure,” believing that, if dogma is to remain “supernatural,” it must be all the more divine.’ This kind of theology, he explained, acts ‘as though the same God were not the author of both nature and grace.’”[xxxv] “The challenge for the Church, from de Lubac’s perspective, is to engage the reigning secular and atheistic philosophies in order to expose their internal contradictions and inherent nihilism but, more important, to offer the Catholic faith as an alternative and more beautiful vision and way of life.”[xxxvi]

Voegelin wrote in similar terms about how metaphysicians hypostatized the poles of the tension in the Metaxy into entities about which they could then make merely “propositional” pronouncements. Voegelin called the kind of debate engaged in by metaphysicians of the various resulting camps “dogmatomachy,” producing endless debates without even the possibility of any resolutions.[xxxvii]

In contrast, the experiences Voegelin and de Lubac evoke are of longing for something that one knows is not here, that it is not in the gift of the world to give.[xxxviii] What one longs for is transcendent, God.[xxxix] God is not encountered in a philosophical or theological abstraction, in metaphysical propositions, in discursive reasoning, or in a “proof,” but in the deep core of human consciousness. The praeambula fidei may, as the name indicates, prepare us for faith [xl] but it is subject to attack on the level of propositional debate –Voegelin’s “dogmatomachy” – and it is not itself faith. The experience of faith, once it becomes rooted in consciousness, is proof against attack on the level of propositional debate. Faith, hope, and love are themselves forms of cognition.[xli]

De Lubac and the Natural Desire to See God

De Lubac’s Surnaturel was published in Paris in 1946, and created a storm of controversy.[xlii] De Lubac modified it in an article published in 1949.[xliii] In his encyclical Humani Generis, promulgated in 1950, Pope Pius XII was thought in one passage to have severely criticized de Lubac’s Surnaturel thesis.[xliv] De Lubac reworked the material in two books published in 1965, Augustinianism and Modern Theology (AMT)[xlv] and The Mystery of the Supernatural (TMS).[xlvi] We will deal here with these two books, which de Lubac referred to as “twins.”[xlvii]

In his Introduction to the 2000 edition of AMT, the theologian Louis Dupre says: “Rarely have I welcomed a book with more satisfaction than this republication of Henri de Lubac’s Surnaturel (1946), part I. Now that the twentieth century has become complete we may confidently call this classic the most significant study in historical theology of the entire period.”[xlviii] As Voegelin says, a person searches for order because of a sense of existence in disorder. So it was with de Lubac. David Schindler says in his Introduction to the 1998 edition of TMS that “De Lubac’s work originated in the face of what may be termed the problem of Catholic theology’s exile from modern culture and the secularism resulting from the mutual estrangement of the Church and the world in the modern period.”[xlix]

The subject of these two books is the relationship between nature and grace, between the natural and the supernatural.[l] De Lubac encountered in the early Church Fathers, especially Augustine, and later in Aquinas, the teaching that the human person has one final end, the direct contemplation of God in the Beatific Vision. Only in the Beatific Vision, gained through grace in death, would all of man’s desires find their fulfillment, would all of man’s frenetic restlessness finally cease in rest. This teaching was based on both the essential human experience of longing for transcendence, and on revelation, on reason and on faith.[li] It respected and maintained the essential unity of the human person. It ruled out the idea that man had “two ends,” one temporal and one eternal, along with the idea that there was a realm of “pure nature” unaffected by grace.

Lawrence Feingold, who, in a very scholarly treatment of the subject, sides with Cajetan against de Lubac, says: “For de Lubac, the natural desire to see God is not only the expression of the finality of our nature, but is seen to ‘constitute’ our nature.”[lii] And in a footnote to this text, Feingold says: “This view is already expressed in a letter of de Lubac to Blondel, dating from April 3, 1932, in which de Lubac sketches the nucleus of what will become Surnaturel: ‘Moreover, this concept of a pure nature runs into great difficulties, the principal one of which seems to me to be the following: How can a conscious spirit be anything other than an absolute desire of God?’ In At the Service of the Church: Henri de Lubac Reflects on the Circumstances That Occasioned His Writings, trans. A.E. Englund (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993), 184.”[liii] This question of de Lubac resonates with Voegelin’s writings on the nous and the noetic quest in which the philosopher is engaged.

At the center of this teaching, as we have noted, is a “paradox,” a word that is central to the theology of not only de Lubac, but Voegelin as well. Both thinkers meant essentially the same thing by it in this context. The paradox is that the human person, existing in the natural realm, recognizes that his end or perfection is only in the supernatural realm, and recognizes at the same time that he has absolutely no power to achieve this end on his own. The only thing he truly desires, he cannot obtain. Only God can give it to him. This paradox is the human person. The nobility, the glory, and the misery of man are all aspects of his paradoxical nature. While man is by, in, and of nature, he is ultimately not for nature. Man is the only creature of which a non-natural end can be predicated.[liv] If man is conceived of as existing in a state of “pure nature,” as he came to be in the course of the history of Christian theology as described by de Lubac, the source of his nobility drains away. He becomes the merely “modern.”

The agreement of Voegelin and de Lubac on this fundamental principle of philosophical anthropology forms the essential link between them.

The paradox, which is validated on the experiential level, necessarily provokes doctrinal questions, which theologians are then drawn to answer. In that process, matters may be clarified, or confused. If confused, further confusion may be caused by the attempt to clear up the first confusion, and so on. As Voegelin would say, truth is never a possession, but it will be gained, and lost, and regained. Both de Lubac and Voegelin were in the position of trying to regain an original truth that had been lost. The doctrinal questions provoked by the paradox in question emerge in de Lubac’s account of the history of Christian theology, and have included: How can man have a natural longing for an end beyond nature? Does man therefore have perhaps two ends, one natural, which he can fulfill through his own efforts, and the other supernatural, which can only be fulfilled by God, instead of just one, supernatural end? If man has only one supernatural end, does God in some sense “owe” man this end? If so, what becomes of “grace”? If man has two ends, what is the relationship between them, and is the natural realm a realm of “pure nature,” thereby preserving the “pure gratuitousness” of the supernatural end?

As we can see, paradox begets problems. The serious thinker is drawn to try to clarify these problems. But the clarification process itself may beget more problems. Worse, it may derail into the creation of “false problems.” The whole process may appear, at least at times, to constitute in theology what Voegelin called “dogmatomachy” in philosophy. But the process does not disappear. It arises, we might say, out of human nature itself. While Voegelin is critical of propositions that are purely dogmatic in the sense that experience has drained out of them, doctrine as such appears to be inescapable. Christ, after all, left Peter in charge of a Church, asking Peter, after Peter acknowledged his love for Him three times,[lv] to “Feed my sheep” (John 21: 17), and promised to send the Holy Spirit to enlighten His Church (Acts 1: 8). Voegelin’s criticisms of doctrine, like de Lubac’s, are aimed at false doctrine, that is, doctrine that has no ground in revelation or experience, or doctrine that has become opaque for the experience that engendered it. Rather than “doctrine,” perhaps it would be better to use the word “tradition” here to convey the sense of something that includes and properly carries valid doctrine through time. As Jaroslav Pelikan put it: “Tradition is the living faith of the dead, traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. And, I suppose I should add, it is traditionalism that gives tradition such a bad name.”[lvi]

Before turning to AMT and TMS, we note that there is a difference in the materials on which Voegelin and de Lubac worked. Voegelin dealt with a vast range of materials, from ancient stone carvings to myths to philosophy to revelation, and a vast range of historical periods, thinkers, and literature. If we can say that Voegelin had a “favorite” thinker, it was surely Plato. And while trenchant analyses of certain Christian theologians appear in Voegelin’s work, Christian theology was not his principal interest. It was de Lubac’s. AMT and TMS cover a dazzling array of Christian theologians down through the centuries, some of whom are, to say the least, obscure to us today. Reading de Lubac’s “twin” books is fascinating for the student of Voegelin because, among other reasons, they detail just how theological doctrine can go wrong, with fateful consequences for personal and political order.

Before considering de Lubac on the history of Christian theology, we might briefly mention Voegelin on the same subject. I am not aware that Voegelin’s dissatisfaction with Christian theology ever formed a separate, complete study for him, as it did for de Lubac, but references to it appear throughout Voegelin’s work. Origen, a third century Christian theologian (and a favorite of De Lubac’s), came in for high praise from Voegelin, who said that Origen maintained the essential balance between “mystical theology” and “school theology.”[lvii] According to Voegelin, doctrine and the experiential truth expressed through doctrine did not separate until after Aquinas.[lviii] The separation could then be seen in nominalism, on the doctrinal side, and in the mysticism of Meister Eckhart, on the experiential side.[lix]

However, Voegelin also maintained that with Thomas, while the mystical, experiential aspect was still present, the stress was placed on school theology.[lx] And Voegelin blamed the institutional Church for the idea that truth is contained and conveyed in dogmatic form, noting that this was an idea that was ultimately embraced by the anti-Christian ideologies that developed in modernity.[lxi] The cause of these “Ideological Empires” was that doctrinalization in the “Orthodox Empires” drained the experiential meaning from the doctrinal symbols, and ideologies, which always develop in a spiritual vacuum, rushed in to fill the vacuum.[lxii] In the literature of the eighteenth century, Voegelin noted a denigration of the very concept of dogma with thinkers like Voltaire and Diderot who did not even realize that there could be legitimate experiences behind dogma.[lxiii] Voegelin was aware of de Lubac, citing de Lubac’s The Discovery of God as a work of theological excellence.[lxiv]

Similar themes appear in Voegelin’s writings. His emphasis is always on the relationship between experience and symbol. To take an example from Voegelin in which he sounds like de Lubac:

“In the historical drama of revelation, the Unknown God ultimately becomes the God known through his presence in Christ. This drama, though it has been alive in the consciousness of the New Testament writers, is far from alive in the Christianity of the churches today, for the history of Christianity is characterized by what is commonly called the separation of school theology from mystical or experiential theology which formed an apparently inseparable unit still in the work of Origen. The Unknown God whose theotes was present in the existence of Jesus has been eclipsed by the revealed God of Christian doctrine. Even today, however, when this unfortunate separation is recognized as one of the great causes of the modern spiritual crisis; when energetic attempts are made to cope with the problem through a variety of crisis and existential theologies; and when there is no lack of historical information about either the revelatory process leading up to the epiphany of Christ, or about the loss of experiential reality through doctrinization; the philosophical analysis of the various issues lags far behind our preanalytical awareness.”[lxv]

Other examples, which could be multiplied, appear in the footnote.[lxvi]

Turning to de Lubac, much of the controversy in which de Lubac involved himself centers on the interpretation of the work of Aquinas, a subject that has filled thousands of books and will fill many thousands more. But by way of the briefest background, we cite three passages from Aquinas upon which de Lubac relied as support for his position that man has a natural desire for God: “. . . every intellect naturally desires the vision of the divine substance, but natural desire cannot be incapable of fulfillment. Therefore, any created intellect whatever can attain to the vision of the divine substance, and the inferiority of its nature is no impediment. Hence it is that the Lord promises men the glory of the angels …”[lxvii] “Final and perfect happiness can consist in nothing else than the vision of the Divine Essence.”[lxviii] “[T]he vision of the divine substance is the ultimate end of every intellectual substance . . .”[lxix]

After Thomas, at the end of the Middle Ages, the concept of a “pure nature,” independent of the order of grace, had begun to emerge. Thus began the process of the separation of the natural from the supernatural, which would ultimately issue in the claim of the natural for its own autonomy, that is, in secularization. De Lubac begins AMT not with the doctrine of “pure nature” in its full-blown form, but with the ideational context out of which that doctrine would fully develop. That context was established by the work of two theologians, Michael Baius (1513-1589), the father of “Baianism,” and Cornelius Jansenius (1585-1638), the father of “Jansenism.” Baius and Jansenius both rejected the concept of “pure nature,” but in rejecting it, they each went too far in other directions.

Baius preserves a relationship between nature and the supernatural, but puts all of his emphasis on the side of man. Man demands his “due” from God, and God, in the order of justice, must give it to him. With Baius, says de Lubac: “We can no longer talk of the relationship between God and man as a mystery of love; the whole thing has become a commercial transaction. Eternal life is offered to man on a basis of strict reward. Man demands, merits and claims; God provides the tool and pays the account to the last penny.”[lxx] Baius’s man stands before God as a litigant, demanding his rights. Baius “really wished to introduce into the very idea of the relationship between the Creator and his creature the idea of a commutative justice.”[lxxi] Baius preserved a relationship between nature and grace over against those who posited a realm of pure nature independent of grace, but lost the essence of the relationship. He “lost all understanding of the mystery of grace.”[lxxii] While Baius claimed Augustine as his master, his idea, said de Lubac, “came from Pelagius.”[lxxiii]

De Lubac criticizes Baius for his “naturalism,” and also for his “radical extrinsicism,” which de Lubac defines as follows: “human nature, without being open to grace in the sense understood by authentic Christianity, since its end remains proportionate to its demands as a creature, does not possess that interiority without the existence of which there can be no connection with philosophy, since for its natural operation an intrusion from outside is required.”[lxxiv] In a passage reminiscent of Voegelin, de Lubac says that while Baius “might continue to use the traditional expressions,” he had lost the sense behind them. The symbol had separated from the experience, much as it had for the advocates of “pure nature” against whom Baius wrote.

“St. Augustine,” says de Lubac, “revealed the completion of nature in its being made supernatural. Baius, on the other hand, reduces the supernatural to the natural. . . Man, according to Baius, thus claims to make use of God to develop and perfect his own nature; once he has done so, he remains man, just as he was beforehand.”[lxxv] Grace, being only man’s due, does not transform him. Baius’ man is “[d]eliberately . . . enclosed within himself. It will be noticed that with Baius there is scarcely ever any question of the beatific vision, he is not interested in this order of things.”[lxxvi] Baius had the mentality of a Pharisee. He essentially held that God owes man grace – but of course, if grace is owed, it cannot be grace. “In this way the supernatural was reduced to the natural level. In condemning this system the Church did not condemn an imaginary error.”[lxxvii]

While Jansenism may seem in a sense to be the opposite of Baianism in that it emphasized the divine side of the relationship to the exclusion of the human, de Lubac sees “Jansenism [as] the exact continuation of Baianism.”[lxxviii] Both claim to be faithful followers of Augustine. Neither is. “While [Baius] understood the relationship between God and the creature. . . on the pattern of a balance sheet or a labor contract, Jansenius seems hypnotized by the biblical image of clay in the hand of the potter. He subordinates everything to the vision of a God, terrible in his almighty power, who knows no law, is accountable to no one, saves one, damns another, according to this own good pleasure. Both failed in their different ways to appreciate the sublime novelty of Christian revelation; the first to a great extent misunderstood the mysterious end to which this revelation calls us, while the second entirely overlooked the way of love which it sets before us.”[lxxix] Baius “tended really to do away with the idea of grace; [Jansenius] in some sort exaggerated it, regarding it as a manifestation of power all the more adorable the more arbitrary and tyrannical it appeared.”[lxxx] Grace, in Jansenius’ sense of the word, “Sometimes . . . appears as an instrument under the complete mastery of man, and sometimes as an invading power taking the place of all natural activity and reducing him whom it ‘set free’ to a new slavery.”[lxxxi]

In contrast, for Augustine, Jansenius’ purported master, “man and God were not two powers in confrontation, nor two individuals who are strangers to each other. He [Augustine] was aware of divine transcendence; he had even experienced the instinctive repulsion of the sinner and of the being imbued with nothingness which doubles, so to say, the distance naturally separating the finite from the infinite. But with St. John and with all humble Christians, he believed in Love. . . Lastly, there was no question for him of opposition between nature and grace, but of inclusion; there was no contest, but union. . . [For Augustine, grace] is not exterior to the soul, but interior . . . ”[lxxxii] Finally, Jansenius, contra de Lubac, and even more contra Voegelin, in complaining of the “intrusion” of philosophy into theology through Scholasticism, took “philosophical reasoning [to be] the mother of all heresies.”[lxxxiii]

Baius and Jansenius left Catholic theology in a position in which, while the concept of a “pure nature,” with its correlative concept of man as having “two ends,” was rejected, and a relationship between nature and grace was maintained, the relationship ruined both the concept of nature and the concept of grace. Baius’ man stands before God boldly demanding grace as a right. Baius’ God is a keeper of accounts. Jansenius’ man stands before God timidly hoping for grace but in his heart secretly fearing both God’s willfulness and His wrath. Jansenius’ God is a tyrant. Neither man thinks of grace as transformative. Neither man thinks of God as a loving father. Neither man is truly Christian. Both men gathered substantial followings. Their influence prompted subsequent theologians to overcome their “heretical” leanings by returning to the doctrine against which Baius and Jansenius had reacted, the doctrine of “pure nature,” the doctrine de Lubac now attacks in his restorative attempt.

Notes

[i] The reference is to Eric Voegelin, “The Pauline Vision of the Resurrected,” Ch. 5 in Order and History, Volume Four, The Ecumenic Age, (Louisiana State University Press, 1974). This caused some to turn away from Voegelin completely—a terrible mistake, in my opinion–and even some of Voegelin’s most fervent disciples to have serious concerns about the direction of his thought. As an example of the latter, see Gerhart Niemeyer, “Eric Voegelin’s Philosophy and the Drama of Mankind,” Modern Age 22 (1976), 22-39; reprinted in Gerhart Niemeyer, Aftersight and Foresight: Selected Essays (University Press of America, 1988). See also, Michael Henry, “Eric Voegelin on the Incarnate Christ,” Modern Age (Fall 2008).

From a Christian viewpoint, one of the most arresting statements in Voegelin is this one: “Uncertainty is the very essence of Christianity.” Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics: An Introduction (The University of Chicago Press, 1952), 122. The context of the remark—a discussion of the problems of modern politics caused by the “re-divinization” of the temporal sphere–hides to some extent its full meaning. But even acknowledging the “uncertainty” implicit in faith, a Christian must still be appalled by the idea that the “very essence” of Christianity is anything other than love.

[ii] I refer to “Christian theology” in this paper, but note here that virtually all of the references are to specifically Catholic theology.

[iii] Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics, op. cit., 107ff.

[iv] Eric Voegelin, “Wisdom and the Magic of the Extreme: A Meditation,” Ch. 13 in The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Volume 12, Published Essays 1966-1985, ed. Ellis Sandoz (Louisiana State University Press, 1990), 324.

[v] Henri de Lubac, The Drama of Atheist Humanism (Cleveland: The World Publishing Company, 1969), vii.

[vi] Ibid.

[vii] Ibid.

[viii] Ibid.

[ix] Ibid.

[x] Voegelin also puts Feuerbach, and the psychology he developed, in the “[F]irst rank” among those responsible for modern ideologies. Eric Voegelin, “Immortality: Experience and Symbol,” Ch. 3 in The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin: Volume 12: Published Essays 1966-1985, ed. Ellis Sandoz (Louisiana State University Press, 1990), 68.

[xi] De Lubac, The Drama of Atheist Humanism, op. cit., vii.

[xii] Ibid., ix.

[xiii] I note here also de Lubac’s tone in discussing the person of Christ. Christ is “the great disturber,” the force in the history of Western civilization that constantly shakes it up. This tone is generally absent in Voegelin’s references to Christ.

[xiv] Michael P. Morrissey, Consciousness and Transcendence: The Theology of Eric Voegelin (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press 1994).

[xv] Ibid., 5-6.

[xvi] I am not aware if de Lubac ever referred to Voegelin in his own writings. Some very positive references to de Lubac appear in Voegelin’s writings. And in a graduate level course I took from Professor Voegelin at Notre Dame in the Spring of 1971 on Volume One of Order and History, Israel and Revelation, he specifically cited de Lubac’s The Discovery of God as a work of “excellence” by a Catholic theologian.

[xvii] Plato, Symposium, 202a ff.

[xviii] John Milbank, The Suspended Middle: Henri de Lubac and the Debate Concerning the Supernatural (William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2005).

[xix] Chapter 1: §6 of Voegelin’s In Search of Order, op. cit., has the title “The Story Begins in the Middle—The Platonic Metaxy,” 27ff.

[xx] De Lubac’s travails at the hands of his fellow theologians are described by various authors, some of whom also note that de Lubac’s theological opponents differed with him politically as well. Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Theology of Henri de Lubac: An Overview (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991), 17ff; Milbank, op. cit., 6ff; Fergus Kerr, “Henri de Lubac,” in Twentieth-Century Catholic Theologians: From Neoscholasticism to Nuptial Mysticism (Blackwell Publishing: 2007); Rudolf Voderholzer, Meet Henri de Lubac, tr. Michael J. Miller (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2008), 62ff. These accounts of what happened to de Lubac for his dissent from what was considered at the time to be “orthodoxy” are chilling. Political struggles in liberal democracies pale in comparison.

[xxi] Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Theology of Henri de Lubac: An Overview, op. cit., 15. Von Balthasar’s statement of the necessarily close relationship between theology and philosophy in the work of De Lubac, a “professional theologian,” reminds us again of their relationship in the work of Voegelin, a “professional philosopher.” However, as indicated above, the relationship is much closer, and always consistently closer, with Voegelin. See Section III, infra.

[xxii] Thomas Cajetan (pronounced Ca-‘je-tan) (1469 – 1534), Italian philosopher, theologian, cardinal (from 1517 until his death), and the Master of the Order of Preachers (1508-18).

[xxiii] I-II, Q. 3, A. 8. De Lubac has not been alone in reading Aquinas this way. Among many others, von Balthasar himself and Etienne Gilson read Aquinas similarly, and level similar criticisms at Cajetan and his reading of Aquinas. In a letter to de Lubac dated July 8, 1956, Gilson excoriated Cajetan: “People conjure up a Thomism after the manner of the Schools, a sort of dull rationalism which panders to the kind of deism that most of them, deep down, prefer to teach. Our only salvation lies in a return to Saint Thomas himself, before the Thomism of John of Saint Thomas, before that of Cajetan as well—Cajetan, whose famous commentary is in every respect the consummate example of a corruptorium Thomae. . . . The theologians . . . right on up to Cajetan and beyond, so many of them have taken such great pains to camouflage the authentic teaching of the master. Let us say, rather, to emasculate his doctrine and to make of his theology a brew of watered-down philosophia aristotelico-thomistica concocted to give off a vague deism fit only for the use of right-thinking candidates for high-school diplomas and Arts degrees. Salvation lies in returning to the real Saint Thomas, rightly called the Universal Doctor of the Church; accept no substitutes! . . . from the viewpoint of the final cause, which is the highest of causes, every evidence, both in the world and in mankind as God created them, points to the supernatural end for which God destined us. In short, according to the Contra Gentiles, the structure and nature of created man are those of a being called to eternal bliss.” Etienne Gilson to Henri de Lubac, July 8, 1956, in Letters of Etienne Gilson to Henri de Lubac: Annotated by Father de Lubac, tr. Mary Emily Hamilton (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988), 23-25. Among other of the most important Catholic theologians of the twentieth century, Jacques Maritain agreed with Cajetan. When reading of the wishes of Thomists for a return to genuine Thomism, one is reminded of Voegelin’s saying, which I paraphrase: “What we need is not Thomism, but a new Thomas.” (Citation, infra.)

[xxiv] Genesis 1: 26.

[xxv] The Confessions of St. Augustine, tr. Hal M. Helms (Paraclete Press, 1986), 7. St. Augustine’s reference to the heart, as opposed to the mind, is evocative, but ignored by most of modern philosophy, which focuses exclusively on the cognitive in the immanent sense. For an attempt by a contemporary Catholic theologian to revive the “heart,” see Dietrich von Hildebrand, The Heart: An Analysis of Human and Divine Affectivity, ed. John Henry Crosby (South Bend, Indiana: St. Augustine’s Press, 2007). While Voegelin and de Lubac do not use the symbol of the “heart,” it is what they often seem to mean.

[xxvi] Ibid., 322.

[xxvii] Quoted in de Lubac, The Mystery of the Supernatural, op. cit., 191, n. 18. One is reminded here of Plato’s “divine madness” in the Phaedrus. See Josef Pieper, “Divine Madness”: Plato’s Case Against Secular Humanism, tr. Lothar Krauth (San Francisco, California: Ignatius Press, 1995). With Blondel, so with Voegelin, “intellection” did not exhaust the full range of human reason.

[xxviii] Both Voegelin and de Lubac would say, contra “modernity,” not only that the transcendence, the supernatural realm, will not “go away,” but that the experience of the transcendence in human consciousness is constitutive of human nature and human history. And both would say that the attempt to bring the transcendence into history—“horizontal” transcendence rather than “vertical” transcendence, to use Camus’s formulation—caused the great disorders of the twentieth century, the bloodiest in human history.

[xxix] See Eric Voegelin, “Introduction,” in The New Science of Politics: An Introduction, op. cit., 1-26. Voegelin’s treatment of the key symbol, “reason,” is much broader, more nuanced, and more consistent, than de Lubac’s. Voegelin would say that through the Enlightenment, “reason” was truncated to mean instrumental, discursive, logical reason, the part of reason that the modern natural scientist uses to discover facts about the material world. And a characteristic of modernity has been to consider the material world to be all of reality. “Reason” and “reality” are thus concurrently truncated, this being a fundamental characteristic of positivism or scientism.

Voegelin explored the effect that positivism has had on science, and especially the social sciences, in a number of places, for example, in his “Introduction” lecture in The New Science of Politics. For de Lubac’s treatment of positivism see his discussion of Comte in The Drama of Atheist Humanism, where he stresses not so much the failure of positivism as an approach to the social sciences, but the failure of positivism as a substitute for Christianity.

[xxx] Some references will be made to Voegelin’s view of Christian theology. As Michael Morrissey has shown, it would be virtually impossible to do a study of Voegelin’s theology that did not consider all of his work.

[xxxi] Two of de Lubac’s books are entitled Paradoxes of Faith and More Paradoxes. Chapters 6-9 of de Lubac’s The Mystery of the Supernatural have the word “Paradox” in the title: “The Christian Paradox of Man,” “The Paradox Unknown to the Gentiles,” “A Paradox Rejected by Commons Sense,” and “The Paradox Overcome in Faith.” I do not know if Voegelin used the word “paradox” throughout his career, but it appears again and again in his later writings. Chapter 1, § 2 of Voegelin’s In Search of Order, the last volume of his magnum opus, Order and History, is entitled, “The Paradox of Consciousness,” and in it, in describing the structure of consciousness, in addition to using the term metaxy, Voegelin introduces (I believe for the first time in his work) his important concepts, and distinctions between, “intentionality” and “luminosity,” and, corresponding respectively, the “thing-reality” and the “It-reality.” I have not done a count, but “paradox” appears in In Search of Order perhaps as often as metaxy.

[xxxii] De Lubac, in discussing the paradoxical nature of the truths of faith, says that the paradoxes “should not surprise us, for they arise in every mystery; they are the hallmark of a truth that is beyond our depth.” Henri de Lubac, S.J., The Mystery of the Supernatural, tr. Rosemary Sheed (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1998), 167. And he quotes the philosopher Etienne Born (1907-1993), who, in discussing the nature of faith, uses a word we are familiar with through Voegelin, the word “tension”: “. . . it is absolutely true that from man’s point of view, the tension between truths is the truth above all others.” Ibid., 171, n. 15.

Rationalism rejects paradox—and mystery. De Lubac notes that heresies arise because the heretic cannot see the ultimate harmony between two truths of faith, and so chooses one, and rejects the other—the heretic is a pure rationalist. Ibid., 175. “. . . one of the first principles of traditional philosophy [is]: that, whatever rationalist philosophers may say in their wish to limit us within the narrow bounds of their immanence, understanding is not the whole measure of human reason; that ‘metaphysical reason’ triumphs only by breaking free of the processes of abstract understanding; and that such understanding ‘remains subject to the spirit.’ . . . ‘Metaphysics,’ says one contemporary philosopher [Marleau-Ponty], ‘is not a build-up of concepts by which we try to make our paradoxes less obvious; it is the experience we have of them in all situations of our personal and collective history.’” Ibid., 177. De Lubac here makes use of the distinction between ratio and intellectus, two parts of human reason. Voegelin, contra rationalism, also made the full range of human reason apparent, even unto its ground in the transcendent. Similarly on the nature of human reason, de Lubac quotes the theologian Auguste Joseph Alphonse Gratry (1805-1872), who said “. . . that impulse from God [the desire to see Him] is interwoven with reason.” Ibid., 186. The “impulse” thus described is very close to “nous,” as Voegelin uses that term.

[xxxiii] Bryan C. Hollon, Everything Is Sacred: Spiritual Exegesis in the Political Theology of Henri de Lubac (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2008), Kindle edition, Loc. 639-665.

[xxxiv] Ibid., Loc. 665.

[xxxv] Ibid., Loc. 678-695.

[xxxvi] Ibid.

[xxxvii] It is clear to the reader of Voegelin that he loved Plato, who wrote dramas. In contrast, the work of Aristotle has come down to us in the form of lectures, with their propositional structure. Voegelin was less happy about this, as he indicated in the part of his Plato and Aristotle that dealt with Aristotle. There Voegelin, in contrasting Plato and Aristotle, said: “I am speaking of the transformation of symbols developed for the purpose of articulating the philosopher’s experiences into topics of speculation.” Eric Voegelin, Order and History: Volume Three: Plato and Aristotle (Louisiana State University Press, 1964), 277. This development, “though present in Aristotle, was still restrained by his genius . . .” Ibid. Voegelin called this development the “derailment” of philosophy, going so far as to say that after Plato it became “so predominant indeed that the history of philosophy is in the largest part the history of its derailment.” Ibid.

Voegelin’s view of the history of Christian theology is similar. Symbol and experience, he would say, remained together in St. Thomas, but even Thomas leaned more towards the side of “School Theology.” And after Thomas, symbol and experience parted ways, and Christian theology derailed. For Voegelin, Aristotle was to philosophy something like Thomas was to theology. This statement is characteristic of Voegelin: “The crack in the precarious balance of a Christian order becomes unmistakable in the High Middle Ages, with the ominous bifurcation of faith and fideism in the parallel movements of mysticism and nominalism. In the sixteenth century, a Christianity that has become doctrinaire explodes in the wars of religion; and their devastations, both physical and moral, arouse wave after wave of disgust with dogmatism, be it theological or metaphysical.” Eric Voegelin, “Immortality: Experience and Symbol,” Ch. 3 in The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin: Volume 12: Published Essays 1966-1985, ed. Ellis Sandoz (Louisiana State University Press, 1990), 55. We might even expect Voegelin to say that after Thomas, nominalism became “so predominant indeed that the history of theology is in the largest part the history of its derailment.” In this, he would be in general agreement with de Lubac, who finds the derailment of theology occurring after Thomas through Neoscholasticism.

[xxxviii] Words other than “longing” also evoke this basic experience, and cut to the heart of the matter, words like “desiring,” “yearning,” “thirsting,” “hungering,” “aching,” “pining.” De Lubac says: “The longing that surges from this ‘depth’ of the soul is a longing ‘born of a lack,’ and not arising from ‘the beginnings of possession.’” Henri de Lubac, S.J., The Mystery of the Supernatural, tr. Rosemary Sheed (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1998), 84.

[xxxix] To use a Thomistic formula, everyone understands “longing for transcendence” to mean longing for God. In the Summa Theologica, I, Q 2, A 3, “Whether God Exists?,” at the end of each of the five “proofs,” Thomas says, respectively: “and this everyone understands to be God”; “to which everyone gives the name of God”; “This all men speak of as God”; “this we call God”; and “this being we call God.”

[xl] See, for example, Ralph McInerny, Praeambula Fidei: Thomism and the God of the Philosophers (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2006); and Ralph McInerny, Characters in Search of Their Author, The Gifford Lectures, Glasgow, 1999-2000 (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001).

[xli] A contemporary attempt to describe the experiential basis of religious belief—even if the experience is not recognized at first as in any way “religious” by the author undergoing the experience, and even if the author fervently resists the implications of the experience–was made by C.S. Lewis in Surprised By Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (Orlando, Florida: Harcourt 1955). It echoes a number of themes found in Voegelin and de Lubac. While what Lewis calls “Joy” includes “longing” in the sense in which I have used that term above, it is somewhat different, although still an experience that cannot be uncommon. “The classic, especially the Aristotelian, unrest is distinctly joyful because the questioning has direction . . . .” Eric Voegelin, “Reason: The Classic Experience,” in Anamnesis, tr. Gerhart Niemeyer (University of Notre Dame Press, 1978), 101.

In his Treatise on the love of God, St. Francis of Sales said, in words quoted by de Lubac that might be applied to Surprised By Joy: “We have a natural inclination towards the sovereign Good, in consequence of which our heart has a certain inward hastening and a constant restlessness, without being able to be appeased in any way, nor to stop showing that its full satisfaction and lasting content are lacking. But when our sacred faith has represented to our mind the beautiful object of its natural inclination, then . . . what comfort, what joy, what a thrill there is throughout our soul . . . The human heart tends to God by its natural inclination without properly knowing who he is; but when it finds him at the fount of faith . . . then, what joys and holy movements there are in the mind, to be united for ever to that supremely lovable goodness! I have at last found, says the soul thus moved, I have found what I longed for. . . . We sometimes feel certain joys which seem to come quite unexpectedly, with no apparent cause, and which are often the forerunners of some greater joy. . . . Then, when that joy arrives, our hearts receive it with open arms, and recalling the delight they had felt without realizing its cause, they then know that it was a kind of forerunner of the happiness that has now arrived. . . .” Quoted in de Lubac, The Mystery of the Supernatural, op. cit., 213-14.

The example of Lewis is a particularly good one. He lived in the twentieth century. His writing style is articulate, direct, and without “academic jargon,” accounting for his popularity among his millions of readers. Moreover, Surprised By Joy, which is Lewis’s “spiritual autobiography” and his own “anamnetic descent” into his early life, has as its subject an experience. Lewis calls the experience “Joy,” and describes it as “an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction.” Surprised By Joy, op. cit., 17-18. It is not an experience “in our power,” but comes upon us unexpectedly and mysteriously. Ibid., 18. “[I]n a sense,” says Lewis, “the central story of my life is about nothing else” than this experience. Ibid., 17. And Lewis, like Voegelin and de Lubac, counted on experience to point to the truth: “What I like about experience is that it is such an honest thing. You may take any number of wrong turnings; but keep your eyes open and you will not be allowed to go very far before the warning signs appear. You may have deceived yourself, but experience is not trying to deceive you. The universe rings true wherever you fairly test it.” Ibid., 177.

Surprised By Joy is like a spiritual mystery story, in that the object of Lewis’s desire is not discovered until almost the very end of the book, and even then only very reluctantly acknowledged by Lewis. Ibid., 228-29. Lewis finally had to learn that his desire implied a desired, and that what he really desired was not his desire, as he supposed, but its object.

[xlii] Henri de Lubac, Surnaturel: Etudes historiques (Paris: Aubier, 1946).

[xliii] Later translated into English as “The Mystery of the Supernatural,” in Theology in History, tr. Anne Englund Nash (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1996), Kindle edition.

[xliv] “Others destroy the gratuity of the supernatural order, since God, they say, cannot create intellectual beings without ordering and calling them to the beatific vision.” Humani Generis, in The Papal Encyclicals, 1939-58, ed. by Claudia Carlen (Raleigh: McGrath, 1981), 175-85, ¶ 26. De Lubac himself was later at pains to show that his work in fact supported this passage from Humani Generis, and that he did not believe the Pope had directed it at him. Henri de Lubac, The Mystery of the Supernatural, trans. Rosemary Sheed (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1998), 50ff.

[xlv] Henri de Lubac, S.J., Augustinianism and Modern Theology, trans. Lancelot Sheppard (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 2011) (“AMT”).

[xlvi] Henri de Lubac, S.J., The Mystery of the Supernatural, trans. Rosemary Sheed (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1998) (“TMS”).

[xlvii] A shorter summary work, Henri de Lubac, A Brief Catechesis on Nature and Grace, tr. Brother Richard Arnandez, F.S.C. (San Francisco, California: Ignatius Press, 1984), was first published in French in 1980.

[xlviii] AMT, op. cit., ix.

[xlix] TMS, op. cit., xi.

[l] It may be helpful to keep in mind throughout this section as a concise organizing principle Thomas’s saying that grace does not destroy nature, but perfects it. ST, I, Q. 1, A. 8., ad.2. (De Lubac emphasizes that it is not correct to say that grace “completes” nature. That would be to make of grace an immanent concept. TMS, op. cit., 94.)

[li] “Beloved, we are God’s children now; it does not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.” 1 John 3: 2.

[lii] Lawrence Feingold, The Natural Desire to See God According to St. Thomas Aquinas and His Interpreters (Naples, Florida: Sapientia Press of Ave Maria University, 2010), 302.

[liii] Ibid., 302, n. 31.

[liv] “Man’s greatness comes from knowing he is wretched: a tree does not know it is wretched. Thus it is wretched to know that one is wretched, but there is greatness in knowing one is wretched.” Blaise Pascal, Pensees, tr. A. J. Krailsheimer (Penguin Books, 1995), 29 (397).

[lv] A triple affirmation reminiscent of Peter’s triple denial.

[lvi] Jaroslav Pelikan, The Vindication of Tradition (Yale University Press, 1984), 65.

[lvii] Author’s notes from a graduate level course taught by Professor Voegelin at Notre Dame in the Spring of 1971 on Volume One of Order and History, Israel and Revelation.

[lviii] Ibid.

[lix] Ibid.

[lx] Ibid.

[lxi] Ibid.

[lxii] Ibid.

[lxiii] Ibid.

[lxiv] Ibid.

[lxv] Eric Voegelin, “The Gospel and Culture,” Ch. 7 in The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin: Volume 12: Published Essays 1966-1985, ed. Ellis Sandoz (Louisiana State University Press, 1990), 199-200.

[lxvi] “The ontological status of the symbols is both human and divine. . . . This double status of the symbols which express the movement in the metaxy has been badly obscured in Western history by Christian theologians who have split the two components of symbolic truth, monopolizing, under the title of “revelation,” for Christian symbols the divine component, while assigning, under the title of “natural reason,” to philosophical symbols the human component. This theological doctrine is empirically untenable—Plato was just as conscious of the revelatory component in the truth of his logos as the prophets of Israel or the authors of the New Testament writings. The differences between prophecy, classic philosophy, and the gospel must be sought in the degrees of differentiation of existential truth.” Ibid., 188-89.

“One can no longer use the medieval distinction between the theologian’s supernatural revelation and the philosopher’s natural reason when any number of texts will attest the revelatory consciousness of the Greek poets and philosophers; nor can one let revelation begin with the Israelite and Christian experiences when the mystery of divine presence in reality is attested as experienced by man, as far back as ca. 20,000 B.C., by the petroglyphic symbols of the paleolithicum.” Eric Voegelin, “Response to Professor Altizer’s ‘A New History and a New but Ancient God?,” Ch. 11 in The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin: Volume 12: Published Essays 1966-1985, op. cit., 293.

[lxvii] SCG, Book 3, Ch. 57. See also, SCG, Book 3, Ch. 50, “That the Natural Desire of Separate Substances Does Not Come to Rest in The Natural Knowledge Which They Have of God,” which Chapter, says de Lubac, is sufficient to refute the position he attacks. TMS, op. cit., 198.

[lxviii] ST, I-II, Q. 3, Art. 8.

[lxix] SCG, Book 3, Ch. 59. Father Pierre Rousselot, who greatly influenced de Lubac, said that
“It is in the nature of intellect as such that he [Aquinas] places a certain attraction, a certain longing to see God as he is.” Cited in TMS, 10, n. 47. The concept of the intellect as the locus of the experience of the divine resonates with Voegelin’s pronouncement that reason is the “sensorium of the transcendence.”

[lxx] AMT, op. cit., 2.

[lxxi] Ibid., 13.

[lxxii] Ibid.

[lxxiii] Ibid., 3.

[lxxiv] Ibid., 6.

[lxxv] Ibid., 23.

[lxxvi] Ibid., 24.

[lxxvii] Ibid., 29.

[lxxviii] Ibid., 36.

[lxxix] Ibid., 32.

[lxxx] Ibid.

[lxxxi] Ibid., 68.

[lxxxii] Ibid., 68-69.

[lxxxiii] Ibid., 61.

This is the first of two parts with part two available here.

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