The Land of Unlikeness

In the 1940s, Henri de Lubac was unusual, at least as far as Roman Catholic theologians go. He was a Thomist, but not by the criteria that the majority of Thomists would have judged other Thomists: he wasn’t educated in Rome under Reginald Garigou-Lagrange, the leading Thomas scholar of the first half of that century; like M.-D. Chenu and Yves Congar, he wrote a lot about the church before Thomas, which led Garigou-Lagrange to write an article called “The New Theology: Where Is It Headed”; he disagreed with the primary commentators on Thomas, such as Cajetan and Suarez; he accused the Thomists of adhering to a Wolffian rationalism and a model of pure nature (thanks to Cajetan and Suarez) that rather than preserving the integrity of human nature and the gratuity of grace resulted in an incoherent idea of human nature which either demanded grace from God out of a plea for justice, or made the natural and supernatural merely two species of the same genus - the supernatural and natural are different, but only on account of the supernatural being a “super” natural. Continue reading ‘Henri de Lubac and the origins of The Mystery of the Supernatural’