This post is the second in a series presenting the Nouvelle Théologie. For background, see the previous post here.

Von Balthasar begins his review of de Lubac's theology with his earliest major book, Catholicisme (1938). What’s interesting about de Lubac from the perspective of intellectual history is that many of his ideas appear to have been formed long before he wrote the books on them, as seen in various articles he published prior to the books. In fact, the books function as a kind of 'completion' of what he had begun conceptually years before. This wasn’t only because the ideas themselves needed time to mature or because he wanted to deepen his positions through historical thinkers—it was also due to political circumstances. Briefly, de Lubac was an active opponent of Nazism, and later of the Vichy regime. Beyond that, his ideas in their raw form provoked institutional resistance from the Church, which forced him to 'wander' through a striking array of European cities while continuing his work.

But back to Catholicisme. Von Balthasar offers us a review of the book, much of which deals with the theological foundations as de Lubac understood them—material that may be of limited interest to a non-Christian reader. However, one insight that I believe is of interest even to non-Christians and non-academics is de Lubac’s claim that without Christ’s revelation, history would not be intelligible. Catholicism sharply divides history into two parts, a division that begets further subdivisions like a fractal. Only because Christ revealed himself are we able to divide history into sections that stand in instrumental-teleological relation, or even to see the internal meaning of events that serve as preparation. This is a subtle theological point, but it effectively denies the 'naturalness' of time and has deeper roots than it might first appear. Christ’s revelation enables the division of history into promise and fulfillment, Old Covenant and New Covenant. So far, this is classic Catholic theology.

The first problem de Lubac offers a unique solution to, according to von Balthasar, is the often-asked question: why is the Catholic Church necessary for the salvation of the world? For readers less familiar with Catholic doctrine, I’ll note this is a problem because it often seems to sincere believers that there are good people outside the Church who are worthy of salvation. Even more, there are ideas outside the Church that have historical value in promoting redemption. Still, a central dogma of the Catholic Church is that salvation is possible only through it. For Catholics (unlike Jews), if salvation is possible outside the Church, that renders the ecclesiastical institution redundant. A lot is at stake.

De Lubac proposes extending the relation of the Old Covenant to all non-Christian people and systems of thought. The Old Covenant undoubtedly contributes, prepares the ground, and promises the coming of Christ. The people of the Old Covenant 'participate' in salvation instrumentally through Christ’s revelation. The solution is interesting, though I’m not sure how new it is. In fact, it 'releases' the linear conception of history without necessarily collapsing into a circular one. After the founding of the Church, a link is formed between what happens within it and what happens in the world at large through a hidden mystical bond. Again, this solution is not entirely unfamiliar, but I’ve rarely seen a contemporary development of it that emerges from outside symbolic or Kabbalistic terminology. Actively, those outside the Church who promote redemption are in fact preparing the 'body' of Christ in this world—a body that is the Church, seen as historically incomplete, though it already operates in another dimension of history, that of the coming redemption. What seems truly new in this view is that de Lubac derives from it a call for active cooperation with all movements seeking to bring redemption to the world—without surrendering to their theoretical claims to objectivity. That’s precisely the Church’s role: to expand the awareness of redemption in the world, relying on the objectivity of the redemption it itself offers, or the completeness of the historical stage it acts within.

(The Fall of the Giants, Giulio Romano)

Von Balthasar also addresses the question of why pre-history (i.e., the history before the history of salvation) continues for so long after Christ’s coming—the start of actual history. For de Lubac, this reflects the pedagogical role of the Church in educating humanity toward the law of the Logos (crudely translated here as 'the law of nakedness'), a doctrine he reworks from Church Fathers like Origen. Christ’s body must be completed before Judgment Day, as promised in the Gospels. While the Church’s history is, in one sense, the history of salvation, there is another sense in which pre-history and history will only fully converge on Judgment Day. In this sense, the Church introduces the concept of completing history and the formal process leading there—but actual history’s role is to guide us concretely to that end.

From the principle of cooperation with the work of redemption, de Lubac also deduces a formal rejection of religions or systems of thought that promote pessimism about the possibility of spreading redemption to all humanity. That is, the objective claims of Islam, Buddhism, and communism—as de Lubac knew them—are denied in one stroke. As long as this denial of universal redemption is endemic to these religions, they cannot be 'converted' into the objective gospel of Catholicism.

From here, von Balthasar proceeds to examine de Lubac’s engagement with different forms of atheism. First, Western atheism. De Lubac rejects the identification of Nietzsche’s 'death of God' with the mystical night of St. John of the Cross. From there he launches an intra-Christian critique of Protestant theologies that attempt to conflate the two. For de Lubac, 'the twilight of the gods' begins in the Gospels themselves (as I’ve noted previously in connection with Milton’s poetry). He divides Western atheism into three types: (1) Feuerbach–Nietzsche–Kierkegaard, (2) Comte, (3) Dostoevsky. What unites the first group is the idea that God can live only in human consciousness and, accordingly, die there in order to expand it. In Nietzsche specifically, two ideas are joined that, in de Lubac’s view, fail to cohere: the idea of the Übermensch and the eternal recurrence. How can the vision of the Übermensch align with eternal recurrence? De Lubac offers a psychological and interesting answer.

A person can be passively driven by the despair associated with the circular motion of recurrence—and thus also participate in the force moving the cosmos. He can affirm determinism while also identifying with the law itself. This is Nietzsche’s principle of 'amor fati', which is in fact not so far from Spinoza’s. Whoever adheres only to recurrence (becoming) succumbs to nihilism. But whoever rises to the rank of the Übermensch (being) will experience human perfection. De Lubac understands Nietzsche as a kind of Western Buddhism: not a Nirvana detached from the world, but no longer imprisoned by Samsara. In de Lubac’s view (which, I think, is well-grounded), this is Nietzsche’s alternative to Christianity—one in constant comparison with Christ. The problem de Lubac has with Kierkegaard is even more interesting: Kierkegaard excludes Hegelianism so radically that he may have eliminated any universal dimension from it in the first place.

On to Dostoevsky. De Lubac tries to sketch an active portrait of Dostoevsky’s relation to atheism. In his view, Dostoevsky’s central characters who seriously engage with atheism are those who experience a kind of 'eternity': between Kirillov (Demons) and Myshkin (The Idiot). I won’t delve into why exactly these two characters, when atheistic themes appear elsewhere in Dostoevsky too. But I’ll note generally that I strongly recommend Freud’s correspondence or essay on Civilization and Its Discontents, where he responds to an atheist friend who doesn’t know how to place his experience of eternity without a religious framework. Needless to say, Freud’s answer here is somewhere between amusing and tragic in its helplessness as a public atheist intellectual. For de Lubac, Dostoevsky offers in most of his novels a dialectic between the metaphysical and psychological realms (in a Freudian style), and only rarely does a 'pure' Christianity emerge—such as, of course, at the end of Crime and Punishment.

Von Balthasar concludes his discussion of de Lubac’s typology of atheism by examining the atheism of Auguste Comte—a form with (then and now) perhaps the most heirs. This is a 19th-century atheism à la Yuval Harari: one that barely engages with the foundations of atheism and instead offers utopian-political fantasies of humanity’s progress toward atheistic self-consciousness. The key to this atheism is its radical 'positivism': the absolute denial of any question or inquiry that might hint at 'transcendence', and a self-limiting to practical or scientific questions only. Von Balthasar doesn’t really dig into Comte, and it seems de Lubac too misses the interesting core of his thought—namely, the social vision based largely on the historical dynamics of the Church. This is somewhat surprising, since in his reading of Nietzsche, for example, de Lubac succeeds in appropriating Nietzsche’s thought and grappling with its core—not just circling around a conclusion he had already set in advance.

Now we reach Eastern atheism. The flagbearer here is, of course, Buddhism. As an aside, de Lubac notes that only in his day were scholars of the Far East able to objectively assess the nature of the religion. Still, one might say that since de Lubac’s time, little has changed in the popular Western reception of Buddhism since the 19th century. De Lubac first targets Christian missionaries (especially Jesuits) and their skewed interpretations of Buddhism, then turns to Western trends (Guénon, Rudolf Otto, etc.). He identifies three main strategies for relating to Buddhism: (1) the humanist approach, which neutrally exposes its humanistic elements; (2) the syncretic approach (à la Huxley); and (3) the Christian approach, which he associates mainly with Solovyov—one that extracts the positive elements but rejects the objective system itself: “Buddhism’s mysticism is the purest and most coherent ever produced, and leaves no room for a living God.”

This, according to de Lubac, is precisely why Schopenhauer admired Buddhism: its absolute rejection of theism as found in the Bible.

Broadly speaking, de Lubac sees the central position of Buddhism as ahimsa ('non-resistance', 'non-violence'), which cultivates in people desirable traits such as: maitrī (kindness, in an emotional—not financial—sense), dāna (a gift or readiness to help), and karuṇā (sympathy). De Lubac studies mainly the Mahayana tradition in this context, aiming at a selfless, universal self. His doctrinal analysis of these traits is, at the very least, interesting—and clearly more deeply informed by the research of his time than anything I’ve seen in Jewish contexts so far. His central argument opposes the monistic idealism of Buddhism, which prevents the appearance of a true 'you' that can be loved authentically as something heterogenous to the self—and thus fundamentally opposes the basis of Christian love. Objects exist only for those not yet 'initiated' into 'truth', and therefore, fundamentally, in Buddhism—this phrasing is particularly striking compared to Christianity—there is no "opposition of persons." This is a very intriguing point, which at first seems promising, but with a refined sense, one sees that de Lubac is already looking toward more classical Catholic theological themes that themselves radicalize the opposition of persons. In Buddhism, love is merely an intermediate quality, because it presupposes an object and thus is not truly foundational. This applies even to Buddhist variations that seem very similar to Christianity and offer forgiveness of sins through devotion to some Buddha. Against these traditions, de Lubac offers a double argument: first, that the Buddhas in question (e.g., Amitābha) are not gods but preachers pointing to the infinite; and second, that the historical traditions grounding these practices are, in his view, dubious.

The core claim is that according to de Lubac, atheism leads—unknowingly—to fatalism or monism. Both, ultimately, destroy the human personality. Only a God revealed in the flesh, he argues, can rescue what we might justly call a form of humanism: a world in which one can turn to other human beings. De Lubac elaborates on this claim in his book on Teilhard.

After wrapping up the discussion of atheism, von Balthasar moves to what I think is the most interesting part of de Lubac’s thought: the newness of Christ. As a side note, novelty has always been considered a fundamental trait of Christ in the Christian tradition. De Lubac himself loves to quote Irenaeus: “In bringing himself, [Christ] brought all that is new.” I believe the Western emphasis on 'innovation' is in fact a theological leftover from this conception—but more on that another time.

In his major book Surnaturel (The Supernatural), de Lubac engages three questions, whose connection is fundamental but elusive: (1) How can the immanent order of nature contain the possibility of the supernatural order of grace without already including it? (2) How is the understanding of the Old Covenant connected to the New? (3) How are macro-evolutionary processes—specifically, the transition from animal to human—related to the Omega Point (a concept from Teilhard: the point at which the cosmos reunites with its divine source)?

Surnaturel is the work that got de Lubac 'in trouble' with the Church. He published it before it was fully ready, and only years of delicate diplomacy within the Church allowed him not only to resume teaching, but to be recognized—thanks to Ratzinger—as perhaps the most important theologian of the 20th century, or at least one of its most influential (indirectly—since de Lubac himself is difficult for the layperson to read).

The book’s first part addresses a question in intellectual history, which he expands on in two other books—one of which, I’m pleased to say, I’ve read: Augustinisme et théologie moderne and Le mystère du surnaturel. If we strip his thesis of its Catholic context (a problematic move, but doable) and focus strictly on the historical dimension, de Lubac offers a compelling thesis about the secularization of the Catholic Church since the 16th century. This is fascinating, as most secularization theories I'm familiar with—even the more recent ones—focus on Protestantism. De Lubac argues that we can actually view secularization as the outcome of an intra-Catholic theological debate about how salvific grace is obtained. I don’t have the space here to go into his full thesis, but in brief: from the 16th century onward, scholastic theology underwent a 'juridicization' of its traditional frameworks (Aquinas, Augustine). Baius claimed that man 'deserved' grace by nature; Jansen claimed grace was the means by which man fulfills his nature. The quotes de Lubac brings on this are stunning—there was indeed a wholesale conversion of theological-philosophical concepts into legal categories. Nature in general, and human nature in particular, came to be seen in legal terms. To illustrate, I think the dominant metaphor today of nature as something with 'laws' (in the modern sense) originates in these kinds of debates.

Von Balthasar does the work de Lubac sometimes fails at: summarizing the main claims of his complex historical thesis. Unlike Augustine and Aquinas, who saw man as a created being with a nature yearning for the vision of God, dominant Thomist interpreters like Cajetan and then Suarez tended to describe man as possessing a 'purely natural finality' linked to his 'purely spiritual nature'—without that implying any "claim" to God. In other words, even the objections to Baius and his concepts remained within a juridical framing. De Lubac’s project was to show that the Church Fathers, Augustine and Aquinas, did not originally believe in a notion of 'pure nature' in man—rather, his final end was always oriented by the desire to see God.

As a side note, according to de Lubac, the dualism that later fueled modern naturalist philosophy (e.g., Descartes) actually originates in this juridical framing of the question of grace. This is especially interesting because it offers a competing theory to the common thesis (e.g., Heiko Oberman, Charles Taylor) that links secularism and this kind of dualism to late-medieval nominalism. Here it’s worth noting that the American editor of Augustinisme et théologie moderne couldn’t resist adding a preface claiming de Lubac “failed to see the importance of nominalism.” But what might seem critical to a conservative American seeking to reduce modern social problems to the issue of universals may appear negligible to a learned European like de Lubac. He offers us a history of the modern concept of 'nature'—but just as importantly, what Bernard Williams once said he couldn’t understand: a history of the concept of the 'supernatural'. This is not just a historical survey of definitions, but what de Lubac sees as a historical inquiry that yields an internal justification for the term.

De Lubac’s broader argument is fascinating. He shows how opposition to Baius 'poisoned' Catholic theology from within for centuries. The 'rationalist' current within the Catholic Church began treating man as a natural being with an 'added' supernatural nature. That addition eventually came to seem superfluous. Beyond the historical significance of this intellectual history, there’s an important lesson here for anyone working in philosophy: concepts, terms, and arguments are dangerous resources. They have their own historical dynamics. You know how overly aggressive opponents of a position sometimes end up as its mirror image?

The next post in this series will continue expanding on von Balthasar’s reading of de Lubac. I hope this one left you wanting more.

New Theology: Atheism and Secularism (Part…