Recapturing the great tradition

...Another group moved rather in the direction of a political theology (Johann Baptist Metz, Edward Schillebeeckx) that soon gave birth to liberation theology (Gustavo Gutierrez, Leonardo Boff...

...For de Lubac the question was not whether Christianity ought to address the contemporary world...

...One group, represented most strongly by Karl Rahner and Bernard Lonergan, continued their transposition of Thomism into categories more appropriate to an historically conscious age...

...These two concerns were already visible in his first book, Catholicism (1938), and they remained the determining purpose of his whole life's work...

...For these reasons, one may make one's own the words with which Yves Congar ended his review of de Lubac's memories of his life's work: Deo gratias...

...He began his studies in the 1920s, amidst the antimodernist reaction, when what he called a "separated theology" reigned supreme...

...De Lubac at one point considered resigning from the commission in protest...

...I would like to comment briefly on the "later de Lubac," and particularly what is sometimes thought to have been a "conservative" shift in his thinking after the council...

...Congar has described a meeting in Lyons at which the two men discussed whether to accept the appointment...

...Once again, he thought, the faith was being trimmed to meet what other philosophies could allow, and the sense was being lost that the faith might provide a basis on which Christians could address the real problems of contemporary humanity as at least an equal, if not a superior, partner...

...This vision has its own density, its own logic, its own beauty...

...It was in the course of the preparation of this last text, during the council's fourth session, that de Lubac began to express reservations about what was happening at the council...

...Developments both inside and outside the church have made the approach exemplified by de Lubac, as also by Hans Urs von Balthasar and Joseph Ratzinger, again popular...

...It should be possible to overcome the assumption that one must simply choose between these two different methods...

...n David Tracy's typology, de Lubac always exemplified a theological method oriented primarily to "manifestation," to the articulation of the distinct vision of God, self, and world opened up by revelation...

...The council adopted something of this approach in its later documents, particularly in Gaudium et sees, and several postconciliar developments, such as political and liberation theology, exemplify it...

...Some of his judgments on contemporary postconciliar events and theologies may be questioned—I do not believe that he was always accurate or fair in his descriptions of their views...

...De Lubac's influence has been immense...

...These saints and theologians had produced a grand Christian vision, self-confident and comprehensive, catholic in its breadth, humanistic in its depth, not yet narrrowed by the polemics that followed the two great schisms within Christianity, not yet placed on the defensive by the Aristotelian challenge of the thirteenth century, by the threats of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, and by the economic, political, and cultural revolutions of the modern era...

...De Lubac 's rehabilitation began in 1960 when Yves Congar and he were appointed consultors to the Theological Commission set up to prepare doctrinal schemata for Vatican II...

...In this judgment on the medieval, and even the Thomist, effort, there was a great contrast between de Lubac and scholars like Congar, Chenu, Rahner, and Lonergan...

...Others turned rather in the direction of a hermeneutically centered theology (David Tracy, Jean-Pierre Jossua...

...Perhaps it is significant that he hardly ever referred to the work of Lonergan and Rahner...

...De Lubac worked on the subcommission that wrote a text entitled "In Defense of the Purity of the Deposit of Faith," a grab bag of a text, addressing areas of faith considered then under attack...

...These traced the origins of the exile of theology not only to the secularized anthropologies of post-Reformation scholasticism, but also to the shift from symbolics to dialectics that he saw as the main feature of medieval scholasticism...

...When that system crumbled, the solidarity among its opponents began to crack...

...This essentially consisted in a recovery of the great tradition, particularly as Commonweal 31 January 1992: 15 represented by the church fathers and the monastic theologians of the early Middle Ages...

...De Lubac's work in the history of theology represented a revalidation of the symbolically mediated thought of the first Christian millennium, and his work was among the most important factors in the council's reappropriation of the themes and expressions of that age...

...His paper on the proofs for the existence of God and his defense of Teilhard de Chardin had little effect on the final document...

...He always felt far more at home in the world of the church fathers than in that of the medieval Scholastics...

...Its historical model is the construction of the Christian world vision by the fathers of the church...

...The fears of the two men were largely verified: they had perhaps more opportunities to participate in the commission's work than they had anticipated, but the doctrinal texts prepared for the council showed very little influence of their contributions...

...In the 1930s and '40s, he attempted to overcome this cultural alienation by an effort that combined a scholarly recovery of the great Catholic tradition and a demonstration of its power to illumine contemporary life, a power illustrated in his own courageous activities during the Nazi occupation of France...

...They wondered whether their appointment was not something of an afterthought—de Lubac noting that the commission would have twenty-seven members and twenty-seven plus two consultors...

...But I think the more important difference that sets him apart goes back to some of his historical studies...

...There is not the slightest indication that later in his life de Lubac wished to see theology retreat again into the exile from the world to which it had once confined itself...

...It is important to understand this point...

...Few Catholic theologians today, whether they know it or not, are not in his debt...

...As his Mémoire (Sur r occasion de mes &Tits, 1989) makes clear, de Lubac never claimed to be an original or a systematic theologian, and he admitted his philosophical, linguistic, and historical limitations...

...Long after, he spoke of having been something of a "hostage, sometimes even a defendant" on the Theological Commission...

...q Commonweal 31 January 1992: 17...

...For de Lubac, if much had been gained by the rise of scholasticism, much had also been lost...

...The influence of linguistic theory and even of antifoundationalism in philosophy has led to a new sympathy for an epiphanic model by which to communicate the faith, both in catechesis and in theology, as a distinct and substantive source of light and knowledge...

...The real clue to his stance, which remained remarkably consistent throughout his life, lies on the level of basic theological method...

...In certain forms of postconciliar theology he saw a revival, in an opposite political direction, of the same sorts of separation that he had opposed since his youth...

...His late works continued to evoke the figures of great Christian humanists of the past (e.g., his book on Pico della Mirandola) and to study the impact of theological ideas on human history (e.g., his volumes on Joachimitism...

...For de Lubac this was never an acceptable alternative and represented a loss of confidence in the capacity of the tradition to provide grounds for addressing the valid themes of reform, updating, openness to the world, religious freedom, etc...

...His book Surnaturel (1946) was a major factor in overcoming the fatal disjunction that modern theology 14: 31 January 1992 Commonweal had placed between nature and grace...

...On the one hand, there can be no correlation or confrontation unless there is something that stands over and against the contemporary context with a life and substance of its own...

...He feared that the commission would be dominated by Roman theologians and that as mere consultors, unable to vote or even to speak unless requested, Congar and he, on the one hand, would be unable greatly to influence the work, but, on the other hand, would be prevented from criticizing it...

...Christianity was once more in danger of becoming a superficial addition to other essentially complete world views...

...Thomas...

...His questioning of the adequacy of modern theology kept him under suspicion in the 1950s...

...Its historical model is the Thomist effort to rethink and to transpose theology in the light of the new challenges represented by Aristotelian and Arabic philosophy and science in the thirteenth century...

...His books on Buddhism pioneered Catholic participation in interreligious dialogue...

...There is a certain parallel between de Lubac's reservations about the Thomist project and his criticisms of postconciliar theology...

...At Vatican II, de Lubac took part in the effort that led to the rejection at the first session of the texts prepared by the Theological Commission...

...He contrasted the inclusiveness of the church fathers, "those masters of ontological symbolism," to the "dialectical antitheses" of the "Christian rationalists of the Middle Ages...

...One effect of Vatican II was the rapid collapse of the unitary neoscholastic method developed and officially imposed in the modem era, a development to which the council itself had contributed when it discarded the somewhat telegraphic dogmatic style typical of earlier councils and chose a more diffuse, persuasive rhetoric, closer to that of the fathers of the church than to the Scholastics, more meditative and symbolic than reflecfive and systematic...

...Worse still, a fellow-Jesuit, Eduard Dhanis, included in a chapter on doctrinal development a paragraph that condemned an opinion that had been unjustly attributed to de Lubac in the course of the debates that had ended with the 1950 encyclical Humani generis...

...In the decades after, he was an active promoter of the council's teaching and defender of its theological vision from critics on both the Left and the Right...

...This vision and method Tracy contrasts to a "correlational" approach, for which the confrontation between the faith and the contemporary situation is a critical and self-conscious methodological necessity...

...He was never entirely convinced of the success or legitimacy of the great Thomist attempt to "baptize" Aristotle in the thirteenth century...

...After the council this criticism became even sharper in a critique of what he called a "paracouncil" that had hijacked and deformed Vatican II's purpose and accomplishments...

...These criticisms of postconciliar theological developments puzzled many observers, especially those for whom "liberal" and "conservative" remain all-embracing categories...

...On the other hand, some anlaysis of the contemporary situation, its strengths and needs, and some underlying anthropology also must guide the particular reading of the tradition offered by the most epiphanic of preachers and theologians...

...He influenced several of the most important of the conciliar documents, most notably the sacramentally centered ecclesiology of Lumen gentium, Dei verbum's discussion of revelation and tradition, and the treatment of atheism and Christian humanism in Gaudium et spes...

...It is a positive fact, unveiling a world to which Christians, convinced that it corresponds also to the deepest desires inscribed on the human heart and mind, should simply invite others to enter...

...Rehabilitated under Pope John XXIII, he took an active role in Vatican II...

...Still, in the end, both men felt that they could not turn down an offer that seemed to have been made at the insistence of the pope himself...

...He had a right to consider the council's major doctrinal texts as a vindication of his conviction that the great tradition could have modern redemptive significance...

...but Congar's appeal to Dhanis and the latter's vague reply that the problem could be settled later (the offending paragraph was never withdrawn), it seems, led him to reconsider and to remain on the commission...

...When the book on Teilhard that he wrote at the request of his Jesuit superiors appeared, it was criticized in L' Osservatore Romano by one of his fellow members of the Theological Commission...

...There had always been tensions within the conciliar majority, but they were hidden during the council by a common effort to break open the stifling system to which modern scholasticism had reduced the traditional heritage of the faith...

...He was never quite comfortable with the various efforts to acknowledge that modernity in its various aspects might require 16: 31 January 1992Commonweal transpositions, both methodological and substantive, similar to the ones attempted by St...

...It was in responding to this question that the majority at the council began to divide, somewhat in the way that the Solidarity movement in Poland began to fracture when its great enemy lost its power...

...In 1983 Pope John Paul II expressed his own and the church's debt to him by naming him a cardinal...

...He feared that the division between the "laws of society" and supernatural revelation that had permitted so many Catholic theologians to endorse the rightwing Action française was visible again in those who after the council looked to Marxism for social analysis and prescriptions...

...Henri de Lubac was among those (Hans Urs von Balthasar and Joseph Ratzinger are two others) who chose to continue one of the major lines of inquiry and expression that had made the council possible, the one particularly reflected in the conciliar texts on the liturgy, revelation, and the church...

...His several historical studies helped restore the sense of mystery, rooted in the Eucharist, to Catholic ecclesiology...

...As he saw things, the recovery of the great tradition to which he had dedicated his life, and which was finally succeeding, appeared to him to be endangered by a minority of "progressives," effectively aided by the media, who thought it necessary to go beyond what they called "abstract theology" to the "real questions" posed by the "world...

...Anyone interested in attempting this task will have to take the work of Henri de Lubac into account, not only because of his historical contribution to the redemption of Catholic theology in the twentieth century, but also because of his exemplification of the essential tasks of theology as the transmission of the one faith which is supposed to be at once the soul of the church and redemptive revelation for the world and which cannot really be the one without being the other...

...These typologies, of course, are somewhat schematic...

...He remained to the end a fierce critic of a "separated theology...

...He wanted, he said, to be simply a vehicle of the great Catholic tradition, on the one hand revealing its true breadth and depth to the church itself and, on the other, handing on that heritage by showing the relevance of its central insights and values to the problems of this century...

...Within the church, there is a widespread view that the last generation, dominated by a correlational method, has been conspicuously unsuccessful in transmitting the essential Christian faith...

...But if the majority of bishops and theologians at Vatican II were united in opposing the neoscholastic system, they were not agreed as to what was to take its place...

...Soon after de Lubac's death on September 4, 1991, Avery Dulles gave a fine and sensitive description of his theological project in the pages of America (September 28, 1991...

...RECAPTURING THE GREAT JOSEPH A. KOMONCHAK TRADITION IN MEMORIAM: HENRI DE LUBAC he theological career of Henri de Lubac (18961991) spanned the major moments of twentiethcentury Catholic theology...

...His history of exegesis helped prepare for the reintegration into biblical studies of hermeneutical and literary methods...