The Givenness of Desire

Front matter

The Givenness

. of Desire

Human Subjectivity and the Natural Desire to See God

Part 1: De Lubac, Ressourcement, and Neo-Thomism

The French Social and Political Context 14 Three Centuries of Neo-scholasticism: Separation of Nature and Grace 18 The Thomistic Consensus: The Silver Age of Scholasticism 18 Baius, Jansenius, and the State of Human Misery 20 De Lubac’s “Natural Desire for the Supernatural” 21 Impoverished Rationalism and a Return to Mystery 26 Surnaturel amid Theological Tensions: Daniélou and Garrigou-Lagrange 29 A Note on De Lubac’s Theological Style 35 A Different Kind of Lament: De Lubac after the Council 36 Conclusion 38

2 Ressourcement and Neo-Thomism: A Narrative under Scrutiny, a Dialogue Renewed 39 Neo-scholastic Counter-narrative: Feingold’s Challenge 40 Natural and Supernatural Ends 46 Pure Nature and Concrete Historical Nature 51 Obediential Potency and the Aesthetic Compromise 57 The Intelligibility of Nature and the Human Good 59 Conclusion 61 viii Contents Part 2: A Lonergan Retrieval: Pure Nature to Concrete Subject

Analogy and Dialectic: Two Theological Trajectories 66

The Diminishment of Intellectual Desire 68

Beyond the “Erotic Cemetery”: Critical Realism and the Challenge of Intellectual Conversion 70

Eros of the Mind I: Natural Theology 77

Eros of the Mind II: The Emergence of the Question of God 79

Eros of the Mind III: The Challenge of Bias and the Human Good 84

4 Concretely Operating Nature: Lonergan on the Natural

Desire to See God 88

Nature I: Lonergan’s Scholastic Context 89

The Natural Desire to See God 92

Twofold End of the Human Person: Beyond Static Essentialism 98

Nature II: Lonergan on Emergent Probability 100

The Intelligibility of Nature and the Human Good Revisited 103

Obediential Potency and Vertical Finality in the Concrete World Order 107

The Aesthetic Compromise Revisited 112

Erotic-Agapic Subjectivity 116

The Extrinsicism of Supernatural Desire 118

Sanctifying Grace and the Habit of Charity 120

The Four-Point Hypothesis: Trinitarian Structure of the Supernatural 122

The Shift to Interpersonal Relations: New Relation to the Same End 123

Metaphysical and Phenomenological Accounts of Love 124 Metaphysics of Love: Vertical Finality and a Critique of

Extrinsicism 125

Phenomenology of Love: Lonergan and Marion 127

Erotic Subjectivity and Divine Grace 130

Contents ix

Desire to Be Loved 131 Loving in the Flesh: Sexual Pattern of Experience 132 You Have Loved Me First: Human Oath and Divine Love 134

Part 3: Mimetic Desire, Models of Holiness, and the Love of Deviated Transcendence

6 Incarnate Meaning and Mimetic Desire: Saints and the Desire for God 139 Intellectual Desire and Mimetic Desire 140 Lonergan on Incarnate Meaning 144 An Expansion of Incarnate Meaning: Girard’s Mimetic Desire 148 Girardian Sanctity: Pacific Mimesis and the Graced Resistance to Violence 152 Sacrificial Violence, Self-Transcendence, and Self-Sacrifice 154 Conclusion 155

7 The Metaphysics of Holiness and the Longing for God in History: Thérèse of Lisieux and Etty Hillesum 157 The Four-Point Hypothesis and the Metaphysics of Holiness 159 Thérèse of Lisieux: Love in the Heart of the Church 162 Contemplative Life and Openness to the World 162 Little Way as Sanctity Simpliciter 163 Contemplation and Action: Sanctity Simpliciter as Apostolic Sanctity 166 Habit of Charity: Feasting at the Table of Unbelief 167 Etty Hillesum: The Thinking Heart of the Barracks 170 Universal Activity of the Spirit 171 The Little Way of Etty: Quest for Simplicity and Contemplative Rest in God 174 Habit of Charity: “A Balm for All Wounds” 178 Conclusion 182

8 Distorted Desire and the Love of Deviated Transcendence 184

A Civilization of Consumption: The Challenge of Catholic Social Teaching 185 x Contents

Idolatry and Deviated Transcendence: Consumerist Practice in the Realm of the “Sacred” 187 Consumerism as a “Sacralization to Be Dropped” 190 Girard on Consumerism and Mimetic Desire 194 Consumerist Idolatry and the Distortion of the Scale of Values 197 Conclusion 200

Notes 207 Bibliography 253 Index 267

Acknowledgments

Theology is a conversational venture. I am grateful for the opportunity to engage colleagues over the last few years at the following venues: Leuven Encounters in Systematic Theology, Lonergan Workshop at Boston College, Catholic Theological Society of America, the systematic theology colloquium at Marquette University, the West Coast Methods Institute, the Colloquium on Violence & Religion, and the Agora Institute for Civic Virtue and the Common Good.

I owe a particular debt of gratitude to the work of Robert Doran, SJ, Neil Ormerod, and John Dadosky. Engagement with their respective scholarly contributions helped me to chart out my own voice in this conversation. Their generosity over the years has been immeasurable.

Iam thankful for the support of my department chair, Peter Martens, and acknowledge especially the thoughtful feedback received from members of the “Monography Club”: Mary Dunn, William O’Brien, SJ, and Grant Kaplan. During the gestation of this book, Mary was writing The Cruelest of All Mothers: Marie de l'Incarnation, Motherhood, and the Christian Tradition and Grant was completing René Girard, Unlikely Apologist: Mimetic Theory and Fundamental Theology. Their insight and creativity were both inspirational and contagious.

Writing can often be a lonely exercise. I want to thank those colleagues and friends who offered support in special ways, including Christopher Collins, SJ, Gregory Beabout, Thomas Lally, Jason Sengheiser, Kurt Schreyer, Daniel Smith, Monsignor Michael Turek, Kevin Vander Schel, Leonard McKinnis, Joe Mudd, and Jay Hammond. I also express my gratitude to many other colleagues at SLU and beyond: Donald Patten, Tobias Winright, Wayne Hellmann, Matt Theissen, Geoff Miller, Julie Rubio, Jeff Wickes, David Meconi, SJ, Ken Parker, Darren Dias, David xii Acknowledgments

Oughton, Jeremy Wilkins, Mark Miller, Christian Krokus, Pauline Lee, Jeremy Blackwood, Elizabeth Block, Rubén Rosario Rodriguez, Pat Byrne, Kerry Cronin, R.J. Snell, Alden Bass, Jen Popiel, Tom Finan, Mark Morelli, Erik Moser, Fred and Sue Lawrence, Heather Venable, Mike McClymond, Jack Renard, Fr Nicholas Smith, Brian Sholl, Ken Steinhauser, Ben Asen, Brian Robinette, and Dan Finucane. I have profited from memorable conversations on the subject of this book with David Bentley Hart and Lawrence Feingold. I have also benefitted immensely from the assistance of and scholarly conversations with many graduate students, current and former, at Saint Louis University, especially James Lee, Stephen Lawson, Jonathan King, Joshua Schendel, Michael Pilato, and Caleb Little.

A generous Mellon Faculty Development Award at Saint Louis University enabled me to work on this project during the summer of 2014.

I thank my copyeditor, Terry Teskey, and the staff at University of Toronto Press, especially Anne Laughlin. I am obliged as well to the blind peer reviewers for their critical and constructive feedback. I am particularly indebted to acquisitions editor Richard Ratzlaff for his insight and suggestions as well as his encouragement and support.

Iam grateful for the love and support of my parents, Bob and Mary, and my in-laws, Larry and Ann.

Finally, the book is dedicated to my wife, Susanne, and my children, Luke and Anna. Their daily support, good humour, and enduring love through the moments of clarity and the long “dark nights” of writing offered sustenance that was surely undeserved but profoundly appreciated. I am reminded of these consoling lines from Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead: “Love is holy because it is like grace — the worthiness of its object is never what really matters.”

Concrete Subjectivity and the Natural Desire to See God

Introduction

Human desire in the concrete world is intensely dialectical. Its complexity is captured with unparalleled insight in Augustine’s Confessions: his account of the “restless heart” has animated the theological imagination and nourished a wellspring of reflection on the human longing for rest in God.' Although he profoundly recognized the ultimate desire of the human heart, Augustine was not blind to the persistent temptation to idolatry, to our all-too-often distorted love of deviated transcendence: “There is no rest where you seek for it ... You seek the happy life in the region of death; it is not there. How can there be a happy life where there is not even life?”* Thus is the human desire for God in all its concreteness.

Renewed attention to Henri de Lubac’s treatment of the natural desire to see God and his widely accepted dismantling of “pure nature” from its neo-scholastic edifice has awakened the theological community from its historical-contextualist slumber. On the one hand, many thinkers have attempted to rescue, secure, and develop de Lubac’s ressourcement revolution in twentieth-century Catholic thought. Against the rationalistic foundations of modern neo-scholasticism, such critics have hailed de Lubac’s Catholic organic integration of natural desire and supernatural destiny as an antidote to extrinsicist and dualist understandings of nature and grace, enabling the religious to penetrate the whole of human reality.* On the other hand, some have attempted to call this entire thesis into question, and others have attempted to provide certain correctives.* This line of thought has exhibited a renewed interest in securing more intentionally the “intelligibility of nature” in its own right — whether articulated as “pure nature” or “integral nature.” Only a retrieval of the authentic wisdom of Aquinas, along with his faithful, but unfairly maligned, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century commentators, will enable us to discern a pastoral and spiritual solution to the contemporary loss of the authentically sacred. The solution to this crisis “cannot lie in weakening the distinction between nature and grace,” one scholar argues, “or diminishing the coherence of the natural order, but only in rightly understanding how the Christian promise opens the horizon to what we already naturally desire in a dim and inefficacious way.” My own engagement with de Lubac echoes the suggestion of Toulouse Dominican Gilbert Narcisse: on the one hand, de Lubac’s considerable theological contribution “must be read, reread, and meditated upon”; on the other hand, his arguments were rooted in theories that are “much more debatable — and not debated enough.”°

The central question of this book can be stated as follows: How might we understand, in a systematic-theological manner, the human desire for God when it is explored with particular attention, not only to human nature, but also to concrete subjectivity?

In answering this question, the book is guided heuristically by the often neglected yet highly relevant framework set forth by the Jesuit philosopher and theologian Bernard Lonergan (1904-84), as well as by contemporary developments of his work.’ This book identifies Lonergan’s shift of emphasis from human nature to historically conscious subjectivity and traces its influence on his developing position on the “natural desire for God,” attentive to both his earlier presentation of this natural desire within a scholastic context and his later, more phenomenologically informed emphasis on the emergence of the question of God within the conscious horizon of the concrete subject. Lonergan’s contribution is often ignored in the scholarship.’ My aim is to illuminate the vitality of his work, but also to complement his contribution with insights from other thinkers. Having Lonergan as an integrating thread enables the analysis to selectively turn to other thinkers for this complementary and corrective work, especially Hans Urs von Balthasar, Jean- Luc Marion, and René Girard.

The theme of concrete subjectivity is especially pertinent to the debates over the natural desire to see God. As will become clear in the first two chapters, Henri de Lubac privileged concrete, historic nature over an abstract, hypothetical claim about what we would be in a purely natural universe — the maligned theory of “pure nature.” Humanity as it is, de Lubac insists, cannot be equated with a hypothetical nature not called to the vision of God. Even so, neo-Thomists have criticized de Lubac’s position for its lack of metaphysical precision. In Aristotelian-Thomist

Introduction 5 terms, a nature is the same in all who participate in that nature. It is the individual, the person, that is historical and concrete, not the nature itself.

Lonergan’s work has special bearing on this question, due to its explanatory attempt to do justice to both human nature and concrete subjectivity.” Despite the tendency to explain human reality solely in terms of human convention, the discovery of human nature affirmed the existence of a certain permanence and universality inherent in the person that endures beneath the multiplicity of human lifestyles and customs. Aristotle defined such a nature as an “immanent principle of movement and rest.” Human nature, in light of this Aristotelian development, is marked, for Lonergan, by the intellectual movement and rest of the asking and answering of questions — the very spirit of inquiry that transcends human cultural differences. To consider the subject as a knower is to be cognizant of the rich unity of the unfolding of cognitional process. The spontaneously operating spirit of inquiry — the desire to know, the eros of the mind - carries the subject from experience of the data of sense and of consciousness to understanding, and from understanding to judgment. In short, this constitutive intellectual dimension of human nature reveals that human beings have a natural desire for God — a claim that we consider at more length in the first half of the book.

But this claim about the permanence of human nature admits of two interpretations. It may be framed in terms of universal propositions, self-evident truths, and naturally known certitudes; or it may be considered as a part of human nature itself, but nature “not abstractly conceived, but as concretely operating.”!' Lonergan opts for the latter. His account of the concrete subject ensures the permanence of human nature, but at the same time it accentuates the way intellectual movement and rest operate concretely in human historical life.

This move to concreteness requires a shift from understanding the human being as an individual substance of a rational nature to understanding him or her as a concretely operating subject. When conceived as substance, human nature is understood as always the same “whether [the individual] is awake or asleep, young or old, sane or crazy, sober or drunk, a genius or a moron, a saint or a sinner.” !? From the perspective of metaphysical substance, these differences are accidental. For Lonergan, however, the subject is not an abstraction but a “concrete reality” — a “being in the luminousness of being.”

Concrete subjectivity attends to the complexity of human living: biological, psychic, and intersubjective; intellectual, moral, and loving; interpersonal, historical, and hermeneutical.“ This fuller view considers the “intimately related moments in the organic unfolding of a consistent and ever more comprehensive understanding of the elusive and polymorphic reality to which each of us is ever present” in the conscious reality of our lives. As concrete human subjects, we are called to self-transcendence, to an ongoing intellectual, moral, and religious conversion. Concrete human existence is a “dramatic enterprise that embraces all aspects of human living — personal, communal, ethical, religious — and it unfolds in time.” 16 The subject as subject is an embodied, engaged entity, embedded in time and subject to death.” As Lonergan put it, “we live and die, love and hate, rejoice and suffer, desire and fear, wonder and dread, inquire and doubt.”'* How might we reimagine and articulate the human desire for God, this book asks, in light of the polymorphic reality of human consciousness?

Lonergan’s emphasis on concreteness is due, in part, to his critical integration of phenomenological insights. Phenomenology prioritizes the truth of disclosure — the intelligible object or state of affairs as it is presented to us and unfolds before us.” It acknowledges the quest for truth, but also the limitations of this search in the concrete life world — “the inescapable ‘other sides’ that keep things from ever being fully disclosed, the errors and vagueness that accompany evidence, and the sedimentation that makes it necessary for us always to remember again the things we already know.”” In addition, phenomenology gives more explicit attention to human embodiment, intersubjectivity, and the gift-character of human interpersonal life.

Lonergan’s turn to more sustained emphasis on intersubjectivity and interpersonal relations is especially important to the argument of this book.” While some work has been done to reframe the natural desire for God debates in light of phenomenology, the relevance of Lonergan’s contribution in this regard has been undertreated.” As Lonergan notes, intersubjective disclosure is “not an object to be apprehended,” but a presence that “works immediately upon my subjectivity, to make me share the other’s seriousness or vivacity, ease or embarrassment, joy or sorrow; and similarly my response affects his intersubjectivity.”*? Thus, phenomenology, for Lonergan, explores “the whole drama of our interpersonal relations” and makes thematic “the preconceptual activities of our intellects, the vertical liberty by which we may emerge out of prevoluntary and prepersonal process to become freely and responsibly, resolutely yet precariously, the persons we choose to be.”

Introduction 7

If the primary aim of this book is to show the relevance of Lonergan’s concrete subjectivity for the natural desire for God debate as it is cast within the neo-scholastic/Lubacian frame, the secondary aim is to investigate, in light of the emphasis on the interpersonal above, how attention to concrete subjectivity prompts us to take seriously the other-mediated, mimetic character of human desire and its impact on conversations about the human desire for God. Little attention has been given to René Girard’s intriguing assertion that “mimetic desire is also the desire for God.”* Accordingly, this book — especially part 3 — engages, as an underlying thread, the ongoing Lonergan-Girard conversation.” It responds to Kevin Lenehan’s suggestion that Girard’s emphasis on “social relations” instead of “individual subjectivity” offers much raw material for theological transposition. Girard’s anthropological emphasis on intersubjectivity, relationality, and the phenomenon of “knowing and willing according to a model” as a ground for “human openness to divine revelation” might complement, Lenehan suggests, “the more cognitive approaches of scholasticism and transcendentalism.”””

Robert Doran has offered a framework — to be revisited in chapter 6 — for integrating natural desire and mimetic desire.” According to Doran, Girard’s mimetic desire penetrates — for better or worse — our spiritual orientation to meaning, truth, and goodness. In other words, distorted mimetic desire can infect the unfolding of the eros of the human spirit, while positive mimesis may strengthen, enhance, and deepen our commitment to the exigencies of the mind.” Positive models have the power to elicit the desire to be faithful to the natural desire for meaning, truth, and goodness. The intersubjective and interpersonal presence of the other may evoke our innate drive for self-transcendence, for being more authentically oneself.*° This theme will be treated in the last part of this book, which considers the relationship between the saints and the human desire for God, on the one hand, and the love of deviated transcendence, on the other hand.

Outline of the Book

This book constructs a multifaceted language for the human desire for God in the context of concrete subjectivity. Part 1 considers the animating force behind the work of Henri de Lubac and the critical scrutiny of his work that has re-emerged in contemporary theology. Chapter 1 captures de Lubac’s critique of the scholastic theory of “pure nature” and his account of the “natural desire for the supernatural” with attention to his social, political, and ecclesiastical milieu. It considers his lament over the loss of the sacred in the modern world and situates his work within the theological and ecclesial tensions that emerged between ressourcement thinkers and neo-Thomists. This is particularly evident in the Daniélou/Garrigou-Lagrange exchange in 1947, an exchange that illuminates some of the key themes in this book: an openness to the categories of subjectivity, historicity, and culture (Daniélou), on the one hand, and the wisdom of a metaphysical account of the natural-supernatural relationship (Garrigou-Lagrange), on the other hand. Chapter 2 captures the contemporary neo-Thomist/Lubacian debate. It first examines Lawrence Feingold’s critique of de Lubac and brings to light several key tensions in light of the work of many contemporary scholars on this topic: the relationship between natural and supernatural ends; pure nature and concrete nature; obediential potency and the “aesthetic compromise”; and the intelligibility of nature and the human good.

In light of this neo-Thomist/Lubacian debate, Part 2 turns to some distinctive contributions of Lonergan and subsequent developers of his thought. In light of a contemporary tendency to diminish rationality, chapter 3 focuses on the erotic roots of the intellectual desire of the concrete subject — the pure, unrestricted desire to know — on which Lonergan bases his account of the natural desire to see God. Though he encouraged the preservation of the theoretical wisdom of metaphysical terms and relations, he also challenged theologians to integrate them within the framework of concrete religious experience and the call for ongoing affective, intellectual, moral, and religious conversion. I thus note his shift in emphasis from an intellectual proof for God’s existence in the tradition of natural theology to the variety of ways the question of God arises in the intellectual, moral, and religious dimensions of our concrete lives. Chapter 4 shows how Lonergan speaks to the legitimate Lubacian emphasis on the concrete and historical, on the one hand, and the Thomist call to affirm a more substantive account of nature, on the other hand. Lonergan’s account of nature in scholastic terms and in his more dynamic and scientifically influenced account of emergent probability — along with his key explanatory terms of vertical finality and obediential potency — offers a reconciling voice to the debate. This substantive account of “nature” both preserves the gratuity of the supernatural order and creates the space for the role of intellectual and moral self-transcendence in rational deliberation about the natural, penultimate goods of social, cultural, and political life. In light of this shift from intellectual desire to a more holistic account of the

Introduction 9 concrete subject, chapter 5 focuses on Lonergan’s later emphasis on the centrality of love. The chapter presents a non-extrinsicist account of the relationship between the natural and the supernatural — an account that preserves the language that has been privileged in the tradition (metaphysical), but transposes it into terms revelatory of the interpersonal experience of being-in-love (intentionality analysis, phenomenology) within a Trinitarian context. After establishing the Trinitarian roots of the human desire for the supernatural, the chapter treats the interpenetration of loving and erotic subjectivity.

Part 3 shifts the inquiry to a more substantive engagement with socially mediated desire. Can the integration of the innate drive for self-transcendence (Lonergan) and mimetic desire (Girard) shed light on the human desire for God as it is manifested in the concrete subject? Chapter 6 constructs a connection between the theme of socially mediated desire and concrete models of holiness. In light of Doran’s integrative model, the chapter brings into conversation Lonergan’s category of “incarnate meaning” and René Girard’s theory of mimetic desire as a means of developing an account of the saints as “living texts” with the power to elicit human desire for God. It also highlights a distinctive feature of a Girardian account of sanctity - humility and resistance to scapegoating, which will pave the way for a discussion of the metaphysics of holiness and the habit of charity in the following chapter. Hence, chapter 7 examines the Trinitarian roots of a theologically grounded phenomenology of the graced life. If the previous chapter borders on the descriptive, this chapter’s return to the four-point Trinitarian hypothesis helps to establish a more explanatory account of holiness. With particular attention to sanctifying grace and the habit of charity — two supernatural realities that make possible the kind of humble love and nonviolent resistance so integral to Girard’s expression of Christian holiness — the chapter offers two specific examples of the human desire for God in a secular age: Thérése of Lisieux and Etty Hillesum. If concrete subjectivity also reveals the biases that infect human desire for God in our fallen condition, then chapter 8 focuses on the task of mitigating the persistent witness of idolatry. This chapter considers more fully the vagaries of desire and the persistent temptation to worship at the altars of false and deviated transcendence. Mindful that theology “mediates between a cultural matrix and the significance and role of religion in that matrix,”*' this chapter focuses on the phenomenon of consumerism, and argues that consumerism ought to be considered, at its extremes, a “sacralization to be resisted,” a distortion of desire, a misdirected religious love.

PART 1 De Lubac, Ressourcement, and Neo-Thomism

1 De Lubac’s Lament:

Loss of the Supernatural

De Lubac’s Surnaturel was “an intentional body blow to the neoscholastic understandings of reason and grace, as well as to neoscholastic conceptions of philosophy and theology and the relation between them.”' Its publication constituted a “cultural event nearly as important as the publication of Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927) or Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (1953).* Beginning with Surnaturel (1949) along with a modified essay, “The Mystery of the Supernatural,” published shortly thereafter in the same year, and continuing with The Mystery of the Supernatural (1965) and Augustinianism and Modern Theology (1965), Henri de Lubac sought to refute the doctrine of “pure nature” as developed by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century neo-scholastic commentators.’

The aim of this chapter is to communicate the heart or animating force of de Lubac’s reflections on the natural desire to see God. Though this book is primarily systematic-theological, I want in the following pages to treat the natural and the supernatural with some attention to de Lubac’s social, political, and ecclesiastical milieu. No doubt the historian will feel short-changed, as will the theologian. The systematic-theological issues raised here will receive more sustained attention later in my treatment of Thomist-Lubacian tensions and my retrieval of Lonergan’s theological contribution. Here, I aim to show that de Lubac was principally concerned with identifying some of the decaying theological and political roots that underlay the disintegration of a sense of the authentically sacred in modern life.

14 The Givenness of Desire The French Social and Political Context

De Lubac’s particular stance on natural desire does not, in Lawrence Feingold’s view, have intrinsic implications for his other works on ecclesiology, scripture, atheism, and so on. In other words, he does not hold that de Lubac’s “particular interpretation of the natural desire to see God represents the key that unifies his theological work, without which it cannot stand.” Feingold means to suggest that his own trenchant critique of de Lubac on nature and grace — which is summarized in the next chapter — ought not indicate a widespread dismissal of the French Jesuit’s contributions to the life of the Church.

One does not have to agree with de Lubac on all the fine details to accept the deeper implications of his work. In this book, after all, I attempt to retrieve the heart of de Lubac’s project, but often differ in terms of the explanatory resources employed. At the same time, I question whether Feingold understates some of the interconnecting threads of de Lubac’s work: “Most of de Lubac’s other writing, which in a sense works out the thesis of Surnaturel in relation to ecclesiology, exegesis, inter-religious dialogue, and secular social and scientific thought, is of a similar character.”° Even if overstated, Milbank is correct to point out a certain kind of organizing impetus to de Lubac’s work. De Lubac’s intellectual concerns with pure nature, the separation of the natural and the supernatural, impoverished religious education, and a rationalist theological culture require an acquaintance with the bitter political and ecclesiastical struggles that shaped his life into the 1950s.

In his essay on the disappearance of the sacred, de Lubac makes a connection between a dualistic understanding of nature and the supernatural and the abstract rationalism of theology (both discussed below) and the sociocultural and political environment of 1940s France. Such dualism and rationalism will not sustain in an age dominated by powerful totalitarian movements. The privileging of abstract propositions tied to ancient controversies and presented in a fragmentary way simply cannot communicate the internal fullness and radiance of the Catholic tradition. “Is a theory,” de Lubac asks, “that tends to separate the supernatural from nature a suitable instrument for penetrating the whole of reality and life of the authentically sacred?”

De Lubac’s ongoing treatment of the relationship between the natural and the supernatural must be read in connection with his other great works of the time, including Catholicism and The Drama of Atheistic Humanism. De Lubac’s concerns — and the larger issues at stake over the nouvelle théologie — were not, as much as they may read at first glance, “narrow, Church-internal controversies over esoteric issues.”” In fact, de Lubac attempted to recover the redemptive role of theology in the world.

One problem had to do with poor religious instruction. De Lubac identifies a distinctive contrast between a mature grasp of secular knowledge and a puerile grasp of religious faith. The latter has “remained that of a child, wholly elementary, rudimentary, a mixture of childish imagination, poorly assimilated abstract notions, scraps of vague and disconnected teachings gathered by chance from existence.”* The failure to foster a mature and intelligent grasp of faith often results in its abandonment. Even scholars have foregone a deep engagement with biblical texts, relegating it to a domain for a few specialists. The Bible became a “source for rationalist objections to which the apologist had to respond.”° It was no longer studied seriously as a religious text — a reservoir of the sacred — and instead became a source for thin apologetics.

To grasp the impoverished religious educational scene requires acquaintance with the social and political situation of late nineteenthand early twentieth-century France.” In broad strokes, the scene divided into supporters of the anti-clerical laicism of the Third Republic, on the one hand, and devotees of monarchy-nostalgic traditional Catholicism, on the other. The concrete political issue centered on the educational system. One side feared that Catholic schools were not fostering loyalty to the Republic, while the other charged the statesponsored schools with perpetuating atheism and anti-Catholicism. The larger issue involved questions about the relationship between the Church and the world. Can one respect the autonomy of the secular without reducing the Church to a privatized ghetto? Several events indicate this tension. The Jesuits, for example, were banned from teaching in 1880. Religious instruction in public schools was made illegal in 1882. The Dreyfus affair (1894-1906) — a case involving the false accusation of a young military officer of Jewish descent — fuelled largely Catholic anti-Semitic, pro-army sympathies over and against anti-clerical republicanism.