ERIC VOEGELIN AND HENRI DE LUBAC: REASON SEEKING TRANSCENDENCE,

NATURE LONGING FOR GRACE

by Thomas E. Lordan

American Political Science Association Annual Meeting, 2014

30th International Meeting of The Eric Voegelin Society, 2014
Panel on “Spirituality and Politics”
August 28, 2014

And he came thither unto a cave, and lodged there; and, behold, the word
of the LORD came to him, and he said unto him, What doest thou here, Elijah?
And he said, I have been very jealous for the LORD God of hosts: for the children
of Israel have forsaken thy covenant, thrown down thine altars, and slain thy
prophets with the sword; and I, even I only, am left; and they seek my life, to take
it away.
And he said, Go forth, and stand upon the mount before the LORD. And,
behold, the LORD passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and
brake in pieces the rocks before the LORD; but the LORD was not in the wind:
and after the wind an earthquake; but the LORD was not in the earthquake: And
after the earthquake a fire; but the LORD was not in the fire: and after the fire a
still small voice. And it was so, when Elijah heard it, that he wrapped his face in
his mantle, and went out, and stood in the entering in of the cave.

1 Kings 19: 9-14.

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ERIC VOEGELIN AND HENRI DE LUBAC: REASON SEEKING TRANSCENDENCE,
NATURE LONGING FOR GRACE
by Thomas E. Lordan 1

I. Introductory: 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. 2 However, and somewhat ironically given de Lubac’s position with the Church, de

1
E-Mail address: tomlordan@q.com.
2
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

Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2484352

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 3

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 forms the

substance of 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

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).
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.
3
I refer to “Christian theology” throughout this paper, but note here that virtually all of the references are to
specifically Catholic theology.

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this context. Voegelin expressed this relatively early in his career by referring to ideology as the

“re-divinization” of the temporal order, 4 and later in his career by referring to “the magic of the
5
extreme,” a term he borrowed from Nietzsche. Similarly, de Lubac said that “Contemporary
6
atheism is increasingly positive, organic, constructive.” 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.” 7 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
8
crops up in all ages and is of no particular significance.” 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

4
Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics, op. cit., 107ff.
5
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.
6
Henri de Lubac, The Drama of Atheist Humanism (Cleveland: The World Publishing Company, 1969), vii.
7
Ibid.
8
Ibid.

4
 9
hollow out a channel for that other atheism which is my real subject.” 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
10
trend, it has three principal aspects, which can be symbolized by three names . . .” The names
11
are Auguste Comte, the founder of positivism; Ludwig Feuerbach, 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.” 12

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.

9
Ibid.
10
Ibid.
11
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.
12
De Lubac, The Drama of Atheist Humanism, op. cit., vii.

5
 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.
13

Thus is the relationship between “Spirituality and Politics,” to take the title of our Panel, rightly

conceived and expressed. 14

And so Voegelin, the political philosopher, and de Lubac, the theologian, both 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
15
shown that Voegelin was as much theologian as political scientist or political philosopher.

Morrissey says that Voegelin in effect dissolved the distinction between philosophy and

theology:

13
Ibid., ix.
14
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.
15
Michael P. Morrissey, Consciousness and Transcendence: The Theology of Eric Voegelin (Notre Dame:
University of Notre Dame Press 1994).

6
 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. . . . 16

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

17
Morrissey suggests, the Church might well benefit by more of an exposure to Voegelin.

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. 18 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
19
timeless. And the first time I became aware of some similarity between Voegelin and de

16
Ibid., 5-6.
17
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. In a course I took from Voegelin at Notre Dame in the Spring of 1971, he
specifically cited de Lubac’s The Discovery of God as a work of excellence by a Catholic theologian.
18
Plato, Symposium, 202a ff.
19
Metaxy describe the essential human experience of existing between two “poles.” One of Voegelin’s clearest
statements of the metaxy is the following:
Not the possession of his humanity, but the concern about its full realization is the lot of
man. Existence has the structure of the In-Between, of the Platonic metaxy, and if anything is
constant in the history of mankind it is the language of tension between life and death, immortality
and mortality, perfection and imperfection, time and timelessness; between order and disorder,
truth and untruth, sense and senselessness of existence; between amor Dei and amor sui, l’ame
ouverte and l’ame close; between the virtues of openness toward the ground of being such as faith,

7
 love, and hope, and the vices of infolding closure such as hybris and revolt; between the moods of
joy and despair; and between alienation in its double meaning of alienation from the world and
alienation from God.
Eric Voegelin, “Equivalences of Experience and Symbolization in History,” Ch. 5 in The Collected Works of Eric
Voegelin, Volume 12, Published Essays 1966-1985, op. cit., 119-20.
Voegelin goes on to warn of the principal danger in the use of so deeply experienced and carefully crafted a
symbol, namely, hypostatization, in which the poles of the tension are split apart into the human and the divine, and
each part of the pair then treated as autonomous, so that the human confronts the divine as if it were another object
in the world, with fateful consequences, including the demand by those who have not entered into the experience
that the existence of the divine be “proven.” As Voegelin continues this passage: “If we split the pairs of symbols,
and hypostasize the poles of the tension as independent entities, we destroy the reality of existence as it has been
experienced by the creators of the tensional symbolisms; we lose consciousness and intellect; we deform our
humanity and reduce ourselves to a state of quiet despair or activist conformity to the ‘age,’ of drug addiction or
television watching, of hedonistic stupor or murderous possession of truth, of suffering from the absurdity of
existence or indulgence in any divertissement (in Pascal’s sense) that promises to substitute as a ‘value’ for reality
lost. In the language of Heraclitus and Plato: Dream life usurps the place of wake life.” Ibid., 120.
Another powerfully evocative work of Voegelin’s along these same lines is his essay, “Reason: The Classic
Experience,” in which he traces other language symbols left by Plato and Aristotle to describe, in other terms, the
essential human experience of existence In-Between. To summarize this without doing it justice: man exists in a
state of ignorance, anxiety, and unrest caused by his awareness of the radical contingency of his being—we do not
cause our own existence but always exist over the terrifying void of not-being; this causes him to wonder about the
ultimate ground of all reality, especially his own; in his wondering, he undertakes a search, a seeking after, a
questioning, which he experiences with a sense of great urgency; in this seeking, man, as the philosopher, feels
himself moved “by some unknown force to ask the questions, he feels himself drawn . . . into the search.” It is the
ground itself—“the unknown source”-- which prompts the questions, which “draws the man into the search” in the
first place. God, in this sense, “reveals” Himself to man as the divine pole in the tension of existence, even as man
searches for God from the human pole. “The man who asks questions, and the divine ground about which the
questions are asked, will merge in the experience of questioning as a divine-human encounter and reemerge as the
participants in the encounter that has the luminosity and structure of consciousness. In the Platonic-Aristotelian
experience, the questioning unrest carries the assuaging answer within itself inasmuch as man is moved to his search
of the ground by the divine ground of which he is in search. The ground is not a spatially distant thing but a divine
presence that becomes manifest in the experience of unrest and the desire to know.” This leads Voegelin to say that
philosophy in the Platonic-Aristotelian sense is philosophy, that is, that philosophy is “a man’s responsive pursuit of
his questioning unrest to the divine source that has aroused it.” Philosophy is an experience—the love (philia)
aroused by and for the divine source of wisdom (sophon); it is not a series of discursive propositions, although that
is what it has become through “doctrinalization” over the centuries since the Greeks. The “questioning unrest in a
state of ignorance [is] a movement in the psyche [of man as philosopher] toward the ground that is present in the

8
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:
20
Henri de Lubac and the Debate Concerning the Supernatural. What struck me about the
21
“Suspended Middle,” just on the surface of the expression, was its similarity to the metaxy. It

turned out that 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
22
trouble within, if not exactly with, the Catholic Church. In describing that position, von

psyche as its mover. . . . the desire . . . to know becomes the consciousness of the ground as the object of desire. . . .”
In the experience, one knows that the ground itself “is not to be found among the things of the external world, nor
among the purposes of hedonistic and political action, but lies beyond this world. . . . There is both a human and a
divine nous, signifying the human and divine poles of the tension . . .” “The movements of the divine-human
encounter” that Voegelin thus describes constitute “man’s tension toward the divine ground of existence.” Eric
Voegelin, “Reason: The Classic Experience,” in Anamnesis, tr. and ed. Gerhart Niemeyer (University of Notre
Dame Press, 1978), 92-97.
A Christian saint quoted by de Lubac, St. Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335-c. 395), expressed these same thoughts
most concisely in his “definition” of God as “he who is sought.” Quoted in Henri de Lubac, S.J., The Mystery of the
Supernatural, tr. Rosemary Sheed (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1998), 200. It was St. Gregory
who also said: “When man has reached perfection, then he begins.” Ibid., 201.
For further discussions of these matters in late writings of Voegelin, see Eric Voegelin, “The Beginning
and the Beyond: A Meditation on Truth,” in The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Volume 28, What Is History?
And Other Late Unpublished Writings, ed. Thomas A. Hollweck and Paul Caringella (Louisiana State University
Press, 1990), 173-232; and the last volume of Voegelin’s Order and History, Volume Five, In Search of Order
(Louisiana State University Press, 1987).
20
John Milbank, The Suspended Middle: Henri de Lubac and the Debate Concerning the Supernatural (William B.
Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2005).
21
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.
22
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

9
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.” 23

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
24
“projected” by certain Catholic theologians, Cajetan a principal among them, 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

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.
23
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.
24
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).

10
 25
come to rest at last. 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
26
image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” 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.” 27

And at the end: “. . . we hope to rest in Your great hallowing.” 28

25
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 below.)
26
Genesis 1: 26.
27
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 mean.
28
Ibid., 322.

11
 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 between

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. 29

Cajetan, however, 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. In the meantime, thought de Lubac, 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

29
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.

12
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. 30 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
31
reduced to natural science, and only what natural science can study is declared real. Politics

30
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.
31
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 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.
In his “Introduction” lecture in The New Science of Politics, Voegelin explores the effect that positivism
has had on science, and especially the social sciences, declaring that “the positivistic era in the second half of the
nineteenth century” resulted in “the destruction of science” as the result of “two fundamental assumptions.” The first
is that: “the splendid unfolding of the natural sciences was co-responsible with other factors for the assumption that
the methods used in the mathematizing sciences of the external world were possessed of some inherent virtue and

13
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.

The title of the Panel in which this paper is presented is called “Spirituality and Politics.”

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

that all other sciences would achieve comparable success if they followed the example and accepted these methods
as their model. This belief by itself was a harmless idiosyncrasy that would have died out when the enthusiastic
admirers of the model method set to work in their own science and did not achieve the expected successes. It
became dangerous when combined with the second assumption that the methods of the natural sciences were a
criterion for theoretical relevance in general. From the combination of the two assertions followed the well-known
series of assertions that a study of reality could qualify as scientific only if it used the methods of the natural
sciences, that problems couched in other terms were illusionary problems, that in particular metaphysical questions
which do not admit of answers by the methods of the sciences of phenomena should not be asked, that realms of
being which are not accessible to exploration by the model methods were irrelevant, and, in the extreme, that such
realms of being did not exist. The second assumption is the real source of danger. . . . For this second assumption
subordinates theoretical relevance to method and thereby perverts the meaning of science. Science is a search for
truth concerning the nature of the various realms of being. Relevance in science is whatever contributes to the
success of this search. Facts are relevant in so far as their knowledge contributes to the study of essence, while
methods are adequate in so far as they can be effectively used as a means for this end. Different objects require
different methods.” Ibid., 4-5.
For de Lubac’s treatment of the principal ideology of the age, 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, as Voegelin does here, but the failure of positivism as a substitute for Christianity.

14
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. Because this paper is presented at a Meeting of the Eric

Voegelin Society, it will concentrate most on de Lubac’s view of Christian theology and its

derailments as expressed in de Lubac’s two “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. 32

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
33
experience. That word is “paradox.” It appears throughout the work of both men. It expresses,

32
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.
33
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

15
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 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.” 34

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.
34
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.

16
 II. An Anamnetic Digression

Voegelin’s great “draw” is the connection he evokes in his readers with what he is

writing and experiences they have had but did not fully understand or appreciate, and would not

have been able to express as well with the materials available to them. 35 That is why it is such a
36
great blessing to find, or stumble upon, a Voegelin, or a de Lubac, in a time of massive
37
deculturation. Voegelin must “reach down” through both doctrine and ideology to “grab” his
38
readers, pull them up, and confront them with the truths of their own experiences. No author I

have ever encountered has done this better than Voegelin. Of course others will have had similar

experiences of “opening to transcendence” through other authors, or through other media, such

as music or art. In any event, through this experience of “opening,” further encounters with

evocative authors, musicians, and artists become possible. Unfortunately, Voegelin himself still

remains largely unknown, even in the academic community, and the re-discoveries of the sources

of order, even in the midst of positivism, which he so enthusiastically and optimistically

39
described in The New Science of Politics, do not appear to have taken general root, as he had

hoped they would.

De Lubac is an author who is similarly evocative. Voegelin and de Lubac invite their

readers to descend into the depths of their own histories to recover the experiences which were

35
Most of modern philosophy has been concerned with the relationship of the mind to the external world.
Voegelin’s concern is more with “internal” experiences, and their meanings.
36
In my own case, I would not have “stumbled upon” Voegelin, or de Lubac, and then later, David Walsh, had I not
first “stumbled upon” Gerhart Niemeyer.
37
At some level, the word “multiculturalism,” which one hears all the time, expresses no more than that the West
has no longer any shared culture, that it has forgotten the culture that made it “the West,” or “left it behind”
somewhere.
38
“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know
the place for the first time.” T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding, from Four Quartets.
39
“Introduction” to The New Science of Politics, op. cit.

17
most important to them. My own interest in comparing Voegelin and de Lubac is a function of

my experiences, which, I believe, are characteristic for Catholics of my generation. Many of us

“lost” our faith as a result of its doctrinalization by the Church in the period before the work of

theologians like de Lubac could become effective in the culture of the Church at large. Many of

those who “lost” their faith in this sense “replaced” it with the ideologies which became matters

of public consciousness, and which first gained public approval, in this country during the 1960s.

Some of us “recovered” our “lost” faith as a result of encounters with Voegelin or someone like

him. Permit me, therefore, a brief “anamnetic descent” which, I hope, will illustrate the problems

with which Voegelin and de Lubac dealt, as I experienced them as a Catholic.

In the Spring of 1971, I was a Senior at the University of Notre Dame, sitting in one of

two classes I was able to take that semester taught by Professor Voegelin, and I heard him begin

a sentence with these words: “The meaning of life is….” I perked up. As a student coming of age

in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, my interest was precisely to find the meaning of life,
40
assuming there was one. Not many professors at that time—or since—would have dared to

begin a sentence with those words, much less to have followed them up with an intelligible

conclusion. After all, then, as now, the very idea that life has a meaning is often treated with

derision by much of the educated class. 41

40
My parents’ interest was to position me so that I could move out of their house and make a comfortable living. I
believe Voegelin would have commended them on their practical wisdom.
41
I was a Philosophy Major at Notre Dame because I thought that Philosophy was the academic department that
concerned itself with just this sort of ultimate question. I was dismayed to learn that most of the Professors I
encountered in that Department were mostly concerned to find out if that table was really there, or if words like
“meaning” themselves had any meaning. They were not looking to find the meaning of anything other than
language. I recall in particular a conversation I had with my academic advisor from the Philosophy Department, a
brilliant man, educated at Yale, who taught Analytic Philosophy. I told him how disappointed I was to find that the

18
 Before “revealing” the rest of Voegelin’s statement, which most Voegelinians can recite

by heart, let me back up and trace the path that led me to sitting in a class taught by Voegelin. I

was born in 1949, raised in the 1950’s in a small Midwestern town, and came of age, as they say,

in the 1960’s. I was the product of a 1950’s-1960’s Catholic Grade and High School education.

The Pope during the period from 1939 to 1958 was Pius XII, who, in his encyclical Humani

Generis (1950), was thought in one passage to have severely criticized de Lubac’s Surnaturel

thesis. 42 This was a time of Catholic dogma on steroids. In the 1950’s, the nuns, God bless them,

taught out of the old Baltimore Catechism. The Catechism consisted of a series of questions and
43
answers, which one had to memorize. “The meaning of life,” according to the Catechism, was

study of philosophy was not more like the study of poetry. He just looked at me as though I had fallen off a hay
wagon into his Department. Being a Midwesterner from a farming community, I suppose in a sense I had.
42
“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.
43
Its “Lesson First” was “On the End of Man,” and its initial questions and answers were these:
Q. Who made the world?
A. God made the world.
Q. Who is God?
A. God is the Creator of heaven and earth, and of all things.
Q. What is man?
A. Man is a creature composed of body and soul, and made to the image and likeness of God.
Q. Why did God make you?
A. God made me to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world, and to be happy with Him for ever in
heaven.
Q. What must we do to save our souls?
A. To save our souls, we must worship God by faith, hope, and charity; that is, we must believe in Him, hope in
Him, and love Him with all our heart.

19
“To know, love, and serve God in this world, and to be happy with Him forever in the next.” The

good thing about this answer is that it is true, as some of us only later discovered. The bad thing

is that it did not take root, at least not for me, and, judging by so many who now say that they

“grew up Catholic,” but discarded their Catholicism somewhere along the way, not for them

either. Part of the problem is illustrated by another Question and Answer from the Catechism:

“Q. How shall we know the things which we are to believe? A. We shall know the things which

we are to believe from the Catholic Church, through which God speaks to us.” 44 In other words,

nothing in our experience will help us. We have no “direct line” to God, so to speak. Unbeknown

to Catholic Grade School students in the 1950s, the Catholic theologians whom de Lubac attacks

had severed the natural and the supernatural realms well before that time, as de Lubac was

pointing out beginning especially with his work in the 1940s, and we were being fed something

like fideism. Our only knowledge of God would come from the Church, which would tell us

what we could know and believe. Moreover, since the Question and Answer seemed to conflate

belief with knowledge, it appeared that the Church was in the business of conveying not just
45
faith, but certainty. As I would learn later, certainty, in the realm of faith, is out of place.

Indeed, certainty is not faith but presumption. 46

44
This is a wonderful example of what de Lubac would call “extrinsicism.”
45
This led to problems when one was forced to question some of the things that happened in the Church, especially
with some of the changes in the Church after Vatican II. For example, one week, if we ate meat on Friday, we were
condemned to spend eternity in Hell. The next week, eating meat on Friday was OK. Then the Church began to
speak in disparate voices. Many pastors preached the Gospel of “social justice,” which was a form of progressivism
and which could slide over into more advanced stages of ideological thinking. I remember one Christmas Eve
Midnight Mass sermon in which the priest, without mentioning the event of the Incarnation, dwelt on the hope that
we had been given by certain things Fidel Castro and others like him had done in the year just passed.
46
I can remember, as can anyone of my age and background, other rather odd things the nuns told us, such as that
having Protestant friends was a “near occasion of sin.” My best friend was a Lutheran—or at least his parents were.
Notwithstanding that, I recognized him as the better person, and did not give up the friendship.

20
 As my generation of “Baby Boomers” passed from the 1950’s into the 1960’s, with its

various shocks to our world, many Catholics of my age, including me, “lost our faith,” as the

saying goes. 47 However, the expression, “losing one’s faith,” is misleading. Most of us who lost

our faith never really had it. We only had the words in which it had been taught, like the words

of the Baltimore Catechism. Faith in that sense was “just” a series of propositions, like chemistry

or biology. It was an exterior reality, which one might or might not approach. It was taught

discursively, logically, as a closed system in which only the initiates could feel comfortable. The

words which made up faith were not rooted in experience. Interiority was ruled out. I remember

attending a lecture with a friend given by a very good Thomist. But the Thomism he offered was

not the vibrant teaching of the Summa. It was some parts of a “system.” The system, as he

presented it, was compelling on an intellectual level, but “closed.” As my friend remarked after

the lecture, she could not buy it. Something was missing, although she could not say exactly

what.

While authors and playwrights like John R. Powers were later to make a fortune fictionalizing this Catholic
culture of the 1950’s and reminiscing about the nuns who taught in Catholic schools in that earlier era, many of the
nuns were saintly women who taught significant life lessons. Furthermore, I have always thought that my early
Catholic education, whatever its particular shortcomings, was invaluable, inasmuch as it introduced me at the
earliest possible age to what I later came to understand to be the most profound of human questions, including
questions of God and death. One cannot start thinking about death too early.
47
To restate Allen Ginsberg: “I saw some reasonably good minds of my generation, bored by dogma, although
managing to stay well fed, sane, and stylishly dressed; dragging themselves through what passed for higher
education at the time, sometimes experimenting with the drugs that were so readily available, not really angry, but
conforming themselves to the age and really having a pretty good time; some of them pretending to be angelheaded
hipsters, but all eventually burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of
American business, obtaining degrees in accounting, business, and law, and then good jobs; populating the suburbs,
foregoing big questions, contenting themselves with having the right opinions, believing in progress through
science, and trying always to be on the right side of history.”

21
 These recollections of the state of Catholic education mirror de Lubac’s concerns about

the state of Catholic theology. Indeed, as Bryan C. Hollon put it in Everything Is Sacred:

Spiritual Exegesis in the Political Theology of Henri de Lubac 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. He believed that
neoscholastics had become so focused on epistemological justifications of the
Thomist system that they failed to engage directly with the atheistic philosophies
having such a strong and dangerous influence on European society. 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.

22
 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.” 48

“’[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.” 49

De Lubac declared that “’Small-minded theology that is not even traditional, separated theology

tagging behind a separated philosophy—it is no more the theology of the Fathers than it is that of

St. Thomas, and the worthless apologetics that it shaped in its image is no closer to the

apologetics whose model has been given to us across the centuries . . .’ 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
50
author of both nature and grace.’ “. . . theologians [de Lubac thought] cannot allow secular

philosophies to have the last or only word on any matter that pertains to the human condition,

matters involving ‘philosophy, the arts, even the sciences, as well as politics, the economy and
51
diverse forms of social organization.’” “According to de Lubac, the theologian must work to

illumine everything that pertains to human nature in the light of grace. In order to do so,

however, the theologian must become an apologist, since the ‘most formidable adversaries of the

Faith, who are also the most interesting, have a conception of the world and a doctrine of life that

they deem to be superior to ours.’ The challenge for the Church, from de Lubac’s perspective, is

48
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.
49
Ibid., Loc. 665.
50
Ibid., Loc. 678-695.
51
Ibid., Loc. 695.

23
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.” 52

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. 53

52
Ibid.
53
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.

24
 While de Lubac was struggling to restore genuine theology and genuine apologetics to

his Church, those of us who had been educated in it were finding that the fact that “something

was missing” from our early Catholic education was only the half of it. The other half, as

suggested by the portions of de Lubac cited above, was that alternative faiths were suddenly

plentiful in the culture, and they appeared to be much more attractive. The alternative faiths, as I

would later come to understand them, were all forms of faith in transcendence conceived

“horizontally” rather than “vertically,” to use Camus’ formulation, in which our generation, as

the vanguard of history, was to “change the world,” either by progressively improving things,

such as by “ending war” or “ending poverty, or by completely ushering in some form or other of

a utopia. 54 We believed that no other generation in history had been given quite this chance, and

that it would all come to pass. To be fair to us, it seemed as though the Church no longer had

anything “interesting” to say to the world, as though it was somehow “disengaged.” And the

1960s were a time of great social upheaval in this country, with the War in Vietnam, the Civil

Rights struggle, and several assassinations. Mainline Churches did not seem to be “socially

conscious,” or even “relevant.”

On the other hand, we allowed ourselves to be seduced by the promise of “horizontal”

transcendence, having never quite come to believe in “vertical” transcendence. We were glad to

trade the hard life of the practice of the virtues for the so much easier life of “idealism,” which

did not involve action but attitude, and, what was better, involved living in a dream world, the

54
In The New Science of Politics, with reference to systems which purport to construct an eidos of history, like those
that came to prominence in this country in the 1960s, and which are now ascendant, Voegelin distinguished a
“teleological component,” in which “the accent lies strongly on movement, without clarity about final perfection, the
result of which will be the progressivist interpretation of history,” and an “axiological component,” in which “the
accent lies strongly on the state of perfection, without clarity about the means that are required for its realization, the
result [of which] will be utopianism,” and cited Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Prometheus as a work to consult on the
subject as to “the ensuing theological debate.” Voegelin, The New Science of Politics, op. cit., 120ff.

25
future world that we would fashion, rather than in the real world. Moreover, not to be “idealistic”

brought near universal scorn, then as now. To be an “idealist” was not only to court near

universal approval, and to live in and for the future, but it did not require one to be good. While

Aristotle’s political science is based on the perception that only ethics can ground genuine
55
political order, and that ethics is itself ultimately grounded in a relationship with the divine, for

the idealist, ethics is beside the point. As Eliot put it in Choruses From the Rock:

They constantly try to escape

From the darkness outside and within
By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.
But the man that is shall shadow
The man that pretends to be.

Ah, to have been young in the 1960’s and 1970’s!

The 1950’s Baltimore Catechism nuns gave way to the radicalized nuns of the 1960’s,

with whom traditional nuns simply could not compete. I encountered one of these nuns in my
56
Catholic High School in the mid-1960’s. The radical nun influenced me greatly, and she was,

in a significant way, an origin of my interest in learning. She opened the world of the intellect as

the Orthodox nuns had not. She was “involved” in the issues of the day, as, for example, my

local pastor was not. And I believed in the promise held out by the radicalism of the 1960’s. It

55
I believe that this is Voegelin’s reading of the Nicomachean Ethics, especially with reference to its
“immortalizing” passages in Book X, Chapter 7. De Lubac reads these passages—as do most scholars—in a
traditional, narrow way, supposing to maintain thereby the distinction between philosophy and theology.
56
In 1963, she was a staunch Republican who read The Chicago Tribune and who, on November 22, 1963,
apologized for the bad things she had said about President Kennedy. By 1967, she had become a staunch a critic of
the American War in Vietnam and of American anti-communism in general, and took some of her students to
Mississippi to register black voters. She brought Father Daniel Berrigan to our High School, where he read one of
his poems, something about clipping the toenails of a god, a poem I understood even less than Howl. Suffering
under her moribund faith, this very intelligent and articulate woman eventually left the convent, married, and moved
to New York City to practice law.

26
was enchanting. This must happen to all who stand on what they believe to be the threshold of

some great historical moment. 57

And so I entered Note Dame in 1967 with an abiding belief in progress and human

perfectibility, intending to study political science and do my part to change the world. Alas,

political science majors at Notre Dame had to take an introductory course in Political Theory,

and there one ran smack-dab into Professor Gerhart Niemeyer. I entered his course as one type of

person, and came out as another. Niemeyer could have that effect. There was no God but
58
Voegelin, we intoned, and Niemeyer was his prophet. Many in my generation entered upon

57
As with Wordsworth and the French Revolution:
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!
...
What temper at the prospect did not wake
To happiness unthought of? The inert
Were roused, and lively natures rapt away!
...
. . . in the very world, which is the world
Of all of us,—the place where in the end
We find our happiness, or not at all!
58
I took two especially transformative courses from Professor Niemeyer, called “Modern Political Ideologies” and
the “Recovery of Political Theory.” I believe they were taught in that order because Niemeyer recognized that
students first had to become disenchanted with the ideological movements by which they had been seduced before
they could undergo any restorative therapy. The therapy was then presented in the works of twentieth century
scholars whose own lives had been touched by ideology, but who had somehow managed to recall, recover, and
restore the experiential sources of Western order. Here one encountered Bergson, Camus, Cohn, Eliade, Frankfort,
Jaeger, Jonas, Lowith, Snell, and Zaehner. Here one read, among other books, Henri de Lubac’s The Drama of
Atheist Humanism and Eric Voegelin’s The New Science of Politics. I remember also the confidence that Niemeyer
and Voegelin had that the recovery of truth in the social sciences in which they were engaged would have a real
impact in the wider culture. Alas, that does not appear to have happened. But one can sense Voegelin’s enthusiasm
in, for example, his “Introduction” to The New Science of Politics from 1952: “While the difficulties should by no
means be underrated, the task begins to become feasible in our time because of the preparatory work that has been
done during the last half-century. For two generations, now, the sciences of man and society are engaged in a

27
their “higher studies” in the 1960’s, similarly devoid of real religious conviction and seduced by

ideological promises. But not all were fortunate enough to run into a Niemeyer or a Voegelin.

Those who did not wound up as the shapers of contemporary American culture, the riders of the

Zeitgeist. We live in their world.

And so, at last, I come back to the course I took from Professor Voegelin in which he

began a sentence with the words, “The meaning of life is….” The rest of the sentence was “. . .

tension toward transcendence.” So: “The meaning of life is tension toward transcendence.” And

then by way of illustration, especially for a student audience that was mostly Catholic, he

immediately followed up that sentence with another, which went something like this: “In terms

of the Christian dispensation, ‘tension’ may be rendered as ‘faith,’ ‘hope,’ and ‘love’.”

Voegelin’s statement of the “meaning of life” is perhaps not so very different from the

Baltimore Catechism’s, yet only Voegelin’s hit home. Why? It helped that my faith in modern

ideologies, which had exploded whatever remained of a young person’s traditional religious

faith, had itself been exploded upon the closer examination that Professor Niemeyer gave it. The

historical movement in which religious symbols lost their meaning, and were replaced by

process of re-theoretization. The new development, slow at first, gained momentum after the first World War; and
today it is moving at a breathtaking speed. . . . The title for these lectures on representation, The New Science of
Politics, indicates the intention of introducing the reader to a development of political science which as yet is
practically unknown to the general public . . .” The New Science of Politics, op. cit., 3. This is not to accuse
Voegelin of entertaining unrealistic expectations. As he put it in 1956 at the end of the Preface to his great work,
Order and History, in anticipating the effect that his work could have in a massively ideological age: “The truth of
order has to be gained and regained in the perpetual struggle against the fall from it; and the movement toward truth
starts from a man’s awareness of his existence in untruth. The diagnostic and therapeutic functions are inseparable in
philosophy as a form of existence. And ever since Plato, in the disorder of his time, discovered the connection,
philosophical inquiry has been one of the means of establishing islands of order in the disorder of the age. Order and
History is a philosophical inquiry concerning the order of human existence in society and history. Perhaps it will
have its remedial effect—in the modest measure that, in the passionate course of events, is allowed to Philosophy.”
Eric Voegelin, Order and History, Volume One, Israel and Revelation (Louisiana State University Press, 1969), xiv.

28
ideological symbols, was reversed in my experience. The ideological symbols lost their meaning,

and so I was open to the recovery of the meaning of religious symbols. More importantly, there

was something in Professor Voegelin’s formulation, and his other formulations, that struck an

existential chord such as nothing had before. Perhaps it was his use of the word “tension.” That

word is particularly evocative. It describes, as it calls to mind, an experience. “Transcendence” is

also evocative. It conjured up a more satisfying image than that of God as an old man with a very

long white beard, seated on a throne, looking somewhat disengaged. With experience, we arrive

at rock bottom reality. One can explore experience, but it cannot be explained away. It was only

after having internalized the Voegelinian formulation that I was able to go back and understand,

on something more than a rote memorization level, something like the Baltimore Catechism. 59

And with de Lubac, we encounter another thinker who plowed through centuries of

dogma to rediscover in Christian theology—especially in the ancient Fathers, in Augustine, and

in Aquinas--a powerfully evocative description of the essential human experience of existing

under, and in relationship towards, God. De Lubac’s own concept of “paradox,” which is at the

center of his work, is similarly evocative. Human nature, de Lubac says, is a fundamental

paradox in that what it most desires, it does not have the power to obtain.

Finally along these lines of personal recollection, let me say that I do not believe that we

are talking about an experience, or experiences, that only a few, particularly graced, or

particularly intelligent, human beings ever have, or that only “mystics” have. Not falling into any

of those categories, their experiences would not strike an existential chord with me. While, as

59
There are of course many other evocative formulations of the experience in question. For example, Professor
Niemeyer often said that the basis of order, personal and political, is attunement to the divine ground of being. Here
the words “attunement” and “ground” are evocative, and call to mind that part of the Our Father in which we pray to
do God’s will here on earth, as it is done in heaven.

29
William James and Eric Voegelin have reminded us, there are “varieties of religious experience,”
60
not only mystics or great philosophers and theologians have them. One does not even have to

read Voegelin or de Lubac to have them. A Christian could hardly believe it to be otherwise,

given the words of the founder of his Church: “Let the children come to me, and do not hinder

them; for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven.” 61

What I did personally appropriate from the sophisticated symbols used by a Voegelin to

describe the divine-human encounter—symbols like metaxy, tension, attunement, ground, and

transcendence--is an understanding of the experience, which I believe every person has, unless

he or she somehow remains unconscious of it or denies it, of longing for something that one
62
knows is not here, that it is not in the gift of the world to give. What one longs for is
63
transcendent, God. 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

60
Was Voegelin a “mystic”? Perhaps. He certainly referred to Plato and Aristotle as “mystics,” a term I have not
seen otherwise applied to them. But when I remember Voegelin sitting at his desk before class, smoking a long cigar
and reading The Wall Street Journal, “mystic” is not the term that comes to mind.
All person are “mystics,” in a sense, if they are aware of their longing for God. One does not have to have a
“Damascus Road” experience, like St. Paul. Concepts like metaxy, the natural desire for the supernatural, and
paradox all describe “mystical” experiences, experiences in which man is in some sense “in contact” with the divine.
61
Matthew, 19: 14.
62
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.
63
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.”

30
 64
consciousness. The praeambula fidei may, as the name indicates, prepare us for faith, 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. 65

64
See, for example, Ralph McInerny, Praeambula Fidei: Thomism and the God of the Philosophers (Washington,
D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2006).
65
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,

31
 III. Christian Theology

The Importance of “God-Talk”

The question is often put in this way: “What practical importance can religion have for

politics?”

In some of the earliest theology in the West, a central issue is faced: How do we even try

to talk about God? It is relatively easy to talk about material reality. But to communicate

experiences of divine reality, non-material reality, and to keep such communications from

degenerating into rigid dogma, or, even worse, from failing to properly describe the reality

experienced—this is a task of major civilizational importance, on which Voegelin and de Lubac

both concentrated. Indeed, they attributed the rise of atheism and modern political ideologies at

least in part to the inadequate descriptions of the human-divine encounter available in Western

Christian theology after Aquinas.

Perhaps the earliest example of this concern in the West is with the Pre-Socratic,

Xenophanes. He attacked the immorality and the anthropomorphic nature of the gods of the

conventional religion:

Homer and Hesiod have attributed to the gods everything that is a shame
and reproach among men, stealing and committing adultery and deceiving each
other.

“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.

32
 But mortals consider that the gods are born, and that they have clothes and
speech and bodies like their own.
The Ethiopians say that their gods are snub-nosed and black, the Thracians
that theirs have light blue eyes and red hair.
But if cattle and horses or lions had hands, or were able to draw with their
hands and do the works that men can do, horses would draw the forms of the gods
like horses, and cattle like cattle, and they would make their bodies such as they
each had themselves. 66

What was Xenophanes’s conception of the gods, to be opposed to that of Homer and

Hesiod?

One god, greatest among gods and men, in no way similar to mortals
either in body or in thought.
Always he remains in the same place, moving not at all; nor is it fitting for
him to go to different places at different times, but without toil he shakes all
things by the thought of his mind.
All of him sees, all thinks, and all hears. 67

66
G.S. Kirk, J.E. Raven, and M. Schofield, trans. and ed., “Xenophanes of Colophon,” in The Presocratic
Philosophers: A Critical History With a Selection of Texts (Cambridge University Press, 1991), 168-69. It will be
noted that in this past paragraph, Xenophanes anticipated Feuerbach.
67
Ibid., 169-70. A similar, but differentiated version of this account of God may be found in Book XII, Part 7 of
Aristotle’s Metaphysics, in which the “physicality” still attributed to God by Xenophanes is removed. There
Aristotle says, in passages Voegelin has commented on:
There is therefore also something which moves [the first heaven]. And since that which
moves and is moved is intermediate, there is something which moves without being moved, being
eternal, substance, and actuality. And the object of desire and the object of thought move in this
way; they move without being moved. The primary objects of desire and of thought are the same. .
. . And thought is moved by the object of thought . . . But the beautiful, also, and that which is in
itself desirable are in the same column . . .
. . . The final cause, then, produces motion as being loved, but all other things move by
being moved.
. . . But since there is something which moves while itself unmoved, existing actually,
this can in no way be otherwise than as it is. For motion in space is the first of the kinds of change,
and motion in a circle the first kind of spatial motion; and this the first mover produces. The first
mover, then, exists of necessity; and in so far as it exists by necessity, its mode of being is good,
and it is in this sense a first principle. For the necessary has all these senses-that which is
necessary perforce because it is contrary to the natural impulse, that without which the good is
impossible, and that which cannot be otherwise but can exist only in a single way.

33
 Finally, Xenophanes’s perception of God extended even to his sense that any knowledge

humans could have of God is a function not only of human seeking, but of divine revelation; that

human knowledge of the divine differentiates over time; and that human knowledge of the divine

will always be necessarily limited by both the nature of the human and the nature of the divine:

No man knows, or ever will know, the truth about the gods and about
everything I speak of; for even if one chanced to say the complete truth, yet
oneself knows it not; but seeming is wrought over all things [or fancy is wrought
in the case of all men].
Let these things be opined as resembling the truth . . .
Yet the gods have not revealed all things to men from the beginning; but
by seeking men find out better in time.

On such a principle, then, depend the heavens and the world of nature. And it is a life
such as the best which we enjoy, and enjoy for but a short time (for it is ever in this state, which
we cannot be), since its actuality is also pleasure. . . . And thinking in itself deals with that which
is best in itself, and that which is thinking in the fullest sense with that which is best in the fullest
sense. And thought thinks on itself because it shares the nature of the object of thought; for it
becomes an object of thought in coming into contact with and thinking its objects, so that thought
and object of thought are the same. For that which is capable of receiving the object of thought,
i.e. the essence, is thought. But it is active when it possesses this object. Therefore the possession
rather than the receptivity is the divine element which thought seems to contain, and the act of
contemplation is what is most pleasant and best. If, then, God is always in that good state in which
we sometimes are, this compels our wonder; and if in a better this compels it yet more. And God is
in a better state. And life also belongs to God; for the actuality of thought is life, and God is that
actuality; and God's self-dependent actuality is life most good and eternal. We say therefore that
God is a living being, eternal, most good, so that life and duration continuous and eternal belong
to God; for this is God.
...
It is clear then from what has been said that there is a substance which is eternal and
unmovable and separate from sensible things. It has been shown also that this substance cannot
have any magnitude, but is without parts and indivisible (for it produces movement through
infinite time, but nothing finite has infinite power; and, while every magnitude is either infinite or
finite, it cannot, for the above reason, have finite magnitude, and it cannot have infinite magnitude
because there is no infinite magnitude at all). But it has also been shown that it is impassive and
unalterable; for all the other changes are posterior to change of place.

34
 If god had not made yellow honey, men would consider figs far sweeter. 68

The term “theology” itself was a neologism coined by Plato, and it has been recognized

since Plato that how we talk about our gods has the greatest influence on our politics:

The classification of symbolic forms . . . has a long history, beginning

with Xenophanes.
An epoch in that history was marked by Plato’s treatment of the problem
in Republic II, since it involved the creation of the term theology. In discussing
the education of children who will grow into the guardians of his Politeia, Plato
raised the question which kind of stories should be told to the young in order to
inculcate in their souls the proper traits of character. Again the fables of Homer
and Hesiod were attacked as unsuitable, and now the unsuitability was
specifically characterized by the term “lie” (pseudos) (377 d-e). . . . Such lies
should be replaced, in the education of the young, by stories following a more
fitting pattern. And on that occasion Plato introduced the term “types of theology
(typoi peri theologias) (379 a) as a technical term for such patterns. The rest of
Book II then was concerned with an exposition of the true “types.”
Plato’s exposition culminated in the notion of the “true lie” (alethos
pseudos), the lie in the heart of the soul where we know about the true nature of
the gods. Misconception about the gods is not an ordinary lie for which may be
found extenuating circumstances. It is the supreme lie which consists in an
“ignorance within the soul” (en te psyche agnoia) (382 a-b). The ignorance of the
soul is the source of mythopoetic figments. To the phantasmata or plasmata of
the myth Plato opposed the truth of the Idea. In so far as his own “types of
theology” were concerned with goodness, changelessness and truthfulness, Plato
offered in this section of the Republic the most explicit self-interpretation of
philosophy as the new theology in opposition to the types of the older myth. 69

All this is by way of background for considering the concerns de Lubac and Voegelin had

with Christian theology, and its importance for politics. They recognized that the “supreme lie”

renders order, including political order, impossible.

De Lubac and “The Natural Desire to See God”

68
Ibid., 179. For more on Xenophanes, see Eric Voegelin, “The Break With the Myth,” in Order and History,
Volume Two, The World of the Polis (Louisiana State University Press, 1964), 171-83; and Werner Jaeger,
“Xenophanes’ Doctrine of God,” in The Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers (Oxford University Press, 1967),
38-54.
69
Eric Voegelin, “The Break With the Myth,” op. cit., 173-74.

35
 De Lubac’s Surnaturel was published in Paris in 1946, and, as we have noted, created a
70 71
storm of controversy. De Lubac modified it in an article published in 1949. He subsequently

reworked the material in two books published in 1965, Augustinianism and Modern Theology
72 73
(“AMT”) and The Mystery of the Supernatural (“TMS”). We will deal here with these two

books, which de Lubac referred to as “twins.” 74

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 Lube’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.”
75

As Voegelin says, a person searches for order because of a sense of existence in disorder.

So it was with de Lubac. As David Schindler says in his Introduction to the 1998 edition of

TMS: “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.” 76

70
Henri de Lubac, Surnaturel: Etudes historiques (Paris: Aubier, 1946).
71
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.
72
Henri de Lubac, S.J., Augustinianism and Modern Theology, trans. Lancelot Sheppard (New York: The Crossroad
Publishing Company, 2011) (“AMT”).
73
Henri de Lubac, S.J., The Mystery of the Supernatural, trans. Rosemary Sheed (New York: The Crossroad
Publishing Company, 1998) (“TMS”).
74
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.
75
AMT, op. cit., ix.
76
TMS, op. cit., xi.

36
 The subject of these two books is the relationship between nature and grace, between the
77
natural and the supernatural. De Lubac encountered in the early Church Fathers, including

Augustine, and in Thomas, 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
78
for transcendence, and on revelation, on reason and on faith. It respected and maintained the

essential unity of the human person.

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
79
the finality of our nature, but is seen to ‘constitute’ our nature.” 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 [discussed below] 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:

77
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.)
78
“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.
79
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.

37
Ignatius Press, 1993), 184.” 80 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, finds his end or perfection only in the supernatural realm, and 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 whom a non-natural end can be predicated.
81
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 Inevitability of Doctrine and Tradition

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,

80
Ibid., 302, n. 31.
81
“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).

38
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, 82 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 which has become opaque for the experience that

engendered it.

82
A triple affirmation reminiscent of Peter’s triple denial.

39
 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
83
name.” Pelikan quotes Edmund Burke as having given “not a bad definition of living

tradition”: “[The rediscovery of tradition] is made possible, and made necessary, by the

continuity of tradition, what Edmund Burke called a ‘partnership in all science, all art, every

virtue.’ But, Burke added, ‘As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many

generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those
84
who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.’” Relative to politics,

Clifford Geertz said: “It is, in fact, precisely at the point at which a political system begins to free

itself from the immediate governance of received traditions . . . that formal ideologies tend first
85
to emerge and take hold.” And in what could be a much longer list, we are also reminded, as

defenders of tradition, of John Henry Cardinal Newman 86 and G.K. Chesterton. 87

83
Jaroslav Pelikan, The Vindication of Tradition (Yale University Press, 1984), 65. Pelikan also says: “Maturity in
our relation to our parents consists in going beyond both a belief in their omniscience and a disdain for their
weakness, to an understanding and a gratitude for their decisive part in that ongoing process in which now we, too,
must take our place, as heirs and yet free. So it must be in our relation to our spiritual and intellectual parentage, our
tradition.” Ibid., 54. For more of Pelikan on Christian doctrine, its necessity and its development, see Jaroslav
Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, 5 vols. (The University of Chicago
Press, 1971).
84
Pelikan, The Vindication of Tradition, op. cit., 20; quoting Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in
France, ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien (New York: Penguin English Library, 1982), 194-95.
85
Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 219. Part of the
contemporary American experience.
86
John Henry Cardinal Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (Notre Dame, Indiana:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1989).
87
Gilbert K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (Garden City, New York: Image Books, 1959).

40
 Pelikan provides a helpful analogy by reference to:

the vigorous debates of the eighth and ninth centuries over the propriety of the use
of images [in the course of which] the distinction evolved between a token, an
idol and a true image or icon. An idol purports to be the embodiment of that
which it represents, but it directs us to itself rather than beyond itself; idolatry,
therefore, is the failure to pay attention to the transcendent reality beyond the
representation. A token, on the other hand, does point us beyond itself, but it is an
altogether accidental representation that does not embody what it represents. An
authentic image, which came to be called icon in Greek and then in other
languages, is what it represents; nevertheless, it bids us look at it, but through it
and beyond it, to that living reality of which it is an embodiment.
. . . Tradition becomes an idol . . . when it makes the preservation and the
repetition of the past an end in itself; it claims to have the transcendent reality and
truth captive and encapsulated in that past, and it requires an idolatrous
submission to the authority of tradition, since truth would not dare to appear
outside it. . . .
What the Enlightenment tended to substitute for [the authority of the
idolatrous tradition that it perceived in medieval thought] was the definition of
tradition as a token, a purely arbitrary representation that does not embody what it
represents. . . .
Tradition qualifies as an icon, by contrast with both of the other views,
when it does not present itself as coextensive with the truth it teaches, but does
present itself as the way that we who are its heirs must follow if we are to go
beyond it—through it, but beyond it—to a universal truth that is available only in
a particular embodiment, as life itself is available to each of us only in a particular
set of parents. Athens and Jerusalem are both human cities. Neither of them is, as
such, the City of God . . . Yet it is to the traditions of Athens and Jerusalem that
their spiritual descendants must turn, over and over again—not to linger there
permanently, but to find there, for each generation of descendants, what we for
our part shall not recognize elsewhere . . . unless we have first seen it here. That is
how tradition as an icon sets itself apart from both the idol and the mere token. 88

De Lubac and Christian Theology

88
Pelikan, The Vindication of Tradition, op. cit., 54-57. A contemporary Catholic theologian has made use of the
distinction between the “idol” and the “icon.” Jean-Luc Marion, God Without Being, 2nd ed., tr. Thomas A. Carlson
(The University of Chicago Press, 2012), Kindle edition, Loc. 428ff.
Pelikan concludes The Vindication of Tradition by quoting Goethe:
What you have as heritage,
Take now as task;
For thus you will make it your own!
Pelikan, op. cit., 82.

41
 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.

One of the courses I took from Professor Voegelin in 1971 was a graduate level course on

Volume One of his Order and History, Israel and Revelation. My notes indicate that, according

to Voegelin, doctrine and the experiential truth expressed through doctrine did not separate until
89
after Aquinas. The separation could then be seen in nominalism, on the doctrinal side, and in

the mysticism of Meister Eckhart, on the experiential side. 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.”

With Thomas, while the mystical, experiential aspect was still present, the stress was placed on

89
I took good notes--this was, after all, Eric Voegelin--but I cannot detail them here.

42
school theology. Voegelin blamed the Church for the idea that truth is contained and conveyed in

dogmatic form, and said that this was an idea that was ultimately embraced by the anti-Christian

ideologies that developed in modernity. The cause of the “Ideological Empires” was that

doctrinalization in the “Orthodox Empires” drained the experiential meaning from the doctrinal

symbols, and ideologies rushed in to fill the vacuum. Ideologies always develop in a spiritual

vacuum. Here Voegelin warned that the “American Empire” was in danger of being overrun by

ideologies. In the literature of the eighteenth century, with Voltaire and Diderot, Voegelin noted

a denigration of the very concept of dogma because these thinkers did not even realize that there

were legitimate experiences behind the dogma. Voegelin also specifically cited de Lubac’s The

Discovery of God as a work of theological excellence.

In Voegelin’s writings, the same theme of “separation” of symbol and experience in

Christian theology after Aquinas emerges, with the consequent problems. For example:

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. 90

90
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.

43
 Other examples appear in the footnote. 91 And they could be multiplied.

Voegelin and de Lubac both recognize the separation of the natural from the supernatural,

to use de Lubac’s terminology, as the source of the problem. But where de Lubac, the Catholic

theologian, sees a distinct break between Christianity and what went before it, Voegelin sees an

essential continuity. More on this later.

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: “. . . 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

91
“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.

44
 92
men the glory of the angels . . .” “Final and perfect happiness can consist in nothing else than
93
the vision of the Divine Essence.” “ . . . the vision of the divine substance is the ultimate end

of every intellectual substance . . .” 94

De Lubac begins AMT not with the problem of the doctrine of “pure nature” that will

ultimately concern him, but with the context out of which that doctrine would fully develop as a

reaction. 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.”

At the end of the Middle Ages, the concept of a “pure nature,” independent of the order of grace,

had begun to emerge. Baius and Jansenius both rejected the concept. But in rejecting it, they

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
95
claims; God provides the tool and pays the account to the last penny.” Baius’s man stands

before God as a litigant, demanding his rights. Baius “really wished to introduce into the very

92
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.
93
ST, I-II, Q. 3, Art. 8.
94
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.”
95
AMT, op. cit., 2.

45
idea of the relationship between the Creator and his creature the idea of a commutative justice.”
96
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
97
understanding of the mystery of grace.” While Baius claimed Augustine as his master, his

idea, said de Lubac, “came from Pelagius.” 98 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
99
from outside is required.” 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
100
he has done so, he remains man, just as he was beforehand.” 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

96
Ibid., 13.
97
Ibid.
98
Ibid., 3.
99
Ibid., 6.
100
Ibid., 23.

46
interested in this order of things.” 101 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.” 102

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
103
“Jansenism [as] the exact continuation of Baianism.” 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
104
way of love which it sets before us.” 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
105
adorable the more arbitrary and tyrannical it appeared.” 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

101
Ibid., 24.
102
Ibid., 29.
103
Ibid., 36.
104
Ibid., 32.
105
Ibid.

47
 106
it ‘set free’ to a new slavery.” 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,
107
grace] is not exterior to the soul, but interior . . . ” Finally, Jansenius, contra de Lubac, and

even more contra Voegelin, in complaining of the “intrusion” of philosophy into theology
108
through Scholasticism, took “philosophical reasoning [to be] the mother of all heresies.”

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.

106
Ibid., 68.
107
Ibid., 68-69.
108
Ibid., 61.

48
 The doctrine of pure nature came into its own in the sixteenth century, the century in

which what de Lubac considers the fateful turn in theology occurs. The turn is from the

conception of man, a creature exiting in the realm of nature, with his one true end in the realm of

the supernatural, to the conception of man as a creature with two ends, one natural (“purely

natural”), and the other one supernatural, with the relationship between them left tenuous, at best.

The concept of the “two ends” and the concept of “pure nature” entail each other. For de Lubac,

the Fathers of the Church, Augustine, Aquinas, and their followers did not deviate from the “one

end” conception of man. De Lubac might say that modernity itself begins around the sixteenth

century with the “two ends-pure nature” conception. De Lubac does say that beginning in the

sixteenth century, the “two ends-pure nature” conception came to dominate over the ancient and

traditional “one end” conception, and led inevitably to the secularism which is with us today.

De Lubac traces in detail the stages by which “pure nature” came to the forefront of

Christian theology. We cannot follow him here in that detail, but we can mention some of the

major theologians who supported this idea.

Since it was thought that the “ancient philosophers” had not known the true, supernatural

end of man, “these theologians came to think that the end conceived by [the] heirs of the ancient

philosophers must be for man his natural end. The idea is fully and decisively stated for the first

time in the work of Denys Ryckel, known as Denys the Carthusian (died 1462), who on two

occasions initiates openly (ex professo) a refutation of the teaching and arguments of St.
109
Thomas.” Had “these theologians” had the insight of a Voegelin into the “ancient

philosophers,” they would not have taken this position.

109
Ibid., 112-13.

49
 Cajetan now followed Denys. While Denys was explicit that his position refuted Aquinas,

Cajetan was not. On the contrary:

. . . his principal originality, particularly in connection with Denys the Carthusian,

is that he puts forward his thesis as an explanation of the thought of St. Thomas.
From Denys to Cajetan, in the space of less than half a century a complete
reversal took place. Swiftly followed by two of his colleagues . . . he originated an
explanation of the texts of St. Thomas which, in essentials, was to continue, with
some slight shifts of emphasis, among many commentators of the Summa and
theologians down to our own century. According to Cajetan, man can have a
really natural desire only for an end which is connatural to him; in speaking of a
desire to see God face to face St. Thomas could only speak of the desire
awakened in man as he is considered by the theologian, that is, he states clearly,
in man actually raised up by God to a supernatural end and enlightened by a
revelation. 110

To the mystic who said, “Hunger presupposes the existence of bread,” Cajetan would

have replied that hunger for food is a natural desire and accordingly has its natural fulfillment,

but nature cannot have a desire for something that cannot be naturally fulfilled. Along these

lines, theologians like Cajetan often cited as unanswerable Aristotle’s statement in De Caelo: “If

nature had given the heavens an inclination toward progressive motion, it would have also given

the means for that motion.” The principle is that inclination for an object necessarily implies the

means to obtain it. No means, no inclination.

The issue is far from settled in the wake of de Lubac’s work. To take just two of the most

eminent Thomists of the twentieth century, Etienne Gilson supported de Lubac, and Jacques

Maritain supported the Neoscholastics against whom de Lubac wrote. Indeed, the issue has

recently re-surfaced, and continues to divide serious thinkers, who take strong positions on both
111
sides. To better understand the issue, we turn to a contemporary, Lawrence Feingold, who

110
Ibid., 113-14.
111
Ralph McInerny opposed de Lubac: Praeambula Fidei: Thomism and the God of the Philosophers (Washington,
D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2006). A number of articles on the subject appear in a book
published in 2009, Surnaturel: A Controversy at the Heart of Twentieth-Century Thomistic Thought, ed. Serge-

50
took Cajetan’s position against de Lubac in a very scholarly work published in 2001. 112 Feingold

begins with a statement from St. Thomas with which, he says, all theologians appear to agree,

namely, that every intellectual creature naturally desires to see God—to know the very essence

of God. However, he continues, “The central point in this debate concerns the precise way that
113
‘natural desire’ should be understood here.” There are, he continues, essentially two sides of

this question. On one side are those who, like de Lubac, hold that this desire “is an innate and

completely unconditioned appetite, independent of knowledge and expressing the intrinsic

114
finality of the spiritual creature.” On the other side are those who, like Cajetan, “see[] this

desire as naturally aroused or ‘elicited’ by some knowledge of God’s existence,” as conditional

rather than absolute. 115 By “elicited natural desire” in connection with the natural desire to know

God’s essence is meant “a desire spontaneously aroused on the basis of prior knowledge of
116
God’s effects in the world.” Cajetan also posited that “. . . the rational creature . . .has a

specific obediential capacity [or potency] to receive the vision rooted in its spiritual nature.” 117

Thomas Bonino, O.P., tr. Robert Williams, tr. Rev. Matthew Levering (Ave Maria, Florida: Sapientia Press of Ave
Maria University, 2009). Two more recent books, which I have not read, uphold the doctrine of “pure nature” and
oppose de Lubac: Steven A. Long, Natura Pura: On the Recovery of Nature in the Doctrine of Grace (Fordham
University Press, 2010); Bernard O.P. Mulcahy, Aquinas’s Notion of Pure Nature and the Christian Integralism of
Henri de Lubac (Peter Lang International Academic Publishers, 2011). Just a glance at the reviews of these two
books on the Amazon website shows that vitriol in theological debate has not gone out of style. While the issue
addressed in these works is sometimes referred to as “only” an “in-house debate” in the Catholic Church, it goes
way beyond that, as both de Lubac and Voegelin would agree.
112
Feingold, op. cit.
113
Ibid., xxiii.
114
Ibid.
115
Ibid.
116
Ibid., xxv.
117
Ibid., xxxvii.

51
 “Elicited natural desire,” if I understand it correctly, is the desire aroused by seeing the

world and wondering what caused it. It is like the desire aroused by seeing a fire, and wondering

what caused the fire. It is not the desire I mean by the “longing” I described earlier. I have a

desire to know the causes of the American Civil War. But the lack of that knowledge is not

essential to my humanity. Is our desire to see God merely another case of a desire to see the

unseen cause of a thing we do see?

The concerns that led to the dominance of the “pure nature-two ends” position in the

sixteenth century and following--which, according to Feingold, who agrees with Cajetan in this

regard as well, was also the position of St. Thomas--are the same concerns that led Feingold to

embrace that approach in the twenty-first century:

Opponents of the existence of an innate appetite for the vision of God . . .

note that innate appetite is always proportionate to the nature of the creature and
to his natural powers, and thus it cannot extend to something which exceeds the
natural order, such as the vision of God. Positing an innate natural desire for the
vision of God would seem to endanger the distinction between the two orders. In
addition, it would put in jeopardy the possibility of a connatural end of man and
thus create grave problems for the theological understanding of the gratuitousness
of grace and glory.
. . . The natural inclination of our will is directed to our connatural end,
but is insufficient to order us to our supernatural end. For this reason grace and
the theological virtues are necessary first to “order” us to the vision of God. This
obviously creates serious problems for those who maintain an innate appetite for
the vision of God. . . .
...
. . . An absolute or unconditional desire for the vision of God seems to
imply the impossibility of a “state of pure nature” (a state in which the intellectual
creature would not be elevated to a supernatural end), for the permanent
frustration of this absolute desire would seem to render impossible any natural
beatitude. Therefore, the existence of an innate natural desire to see God implies
that God must necessarily offer us the beatific vision, and that there could no
connatural or proportionate end for beings endowed with such a desire.
The great difficulty with the notion of an innate, absolute desire to see
God lies in showing how grace and the beatific vision would not be due to a
nature endowed with such a desire. . . . One cannot deny the possibility of a “state

52
 of pure nature” without undermining the gratuitousness of the supernatural order.
118

Feingold agrees with de Lubac that “Contemporary man has lost the sense of the

supernatural character of the Christian promise and vocation; this is the great pastoral problem

that faces us today,” and that de Lubac sought to address. 119 “Nevertheless,” Feingold continues,

the Neoscholasticism against which de Lubac wrote:

has the elements of a solution that provides a fine balance between the natural
desire for the vision of God and the distinction of the natural and supernatural
orders. The pastoral and spiritual solution to our crisis cannot lie in weakening the
distinction between nature and grace, 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. Thus
glory perfectly fulfills what nature would wish but dare not hope.
The key to rightly understanding and developing the Thomistic position
lies in accurately grasping the relation between natural happiness and supernatural
beatitude. Our natural desires can be achieved in two ways: according to the
proportionality of our nature, or absolutely. Supernatural beatitude removes the
creaturely constraints that necessarily limit any natural happiness. 120

One can imagine that de Lubac would reply that Feingold’s “solution,” which is the

Neoscholastic solution, is the problem. In TMS, de Lubac said: “In my concrete nature . . . the

‘desire to see God’ cannot be permanently frustrated without an essential suffering. . . . And

consequently—at least in appearance—a good and just God could hardly frustrate me, unless I,

through my own fault, turn away from him by choice.” 121

John Milbank defends de Lubac and opposes Feingold in a long footnote in The

Suspended Middle. Leaving aside the question of whether Feingold is right, Milbank’s criticism

of him is unfortunately, in my view, overly strident, given the very thoughtful treatment that

118
Ibid., xxix-xxxii.
119
Ibid., xxxv.
120
Ibid., xxxvi.
121
MTS, 54.

53
Feingold gives the subject in The Natural Desire to See God. Milbank calls Feingold’s book

“arch-reactionary . . . written to reinstate a Garrigou-Lagrange type position . . . Frankly this

selectivity [in citing Aquinas] gives the lie to the appearance of scholarly bulk and solidity which

the weight of his tome seems to promise. Its exegetical method is much like that of the proof-

texting of a Protestant fundamentalist. This gets even more ludicrous . . .” 122 And so on.

I would say, however, that the Neoscholastic position, as Feingold describes it, entails the

splitting of very fine theological hairs, and take us away from the existential experience of

longing described by a de Lubac or a Voegelin.

Feingold reminds us of Voegelin’s criticism of Catholic theology—that it wishes to

“monopolize” revelation. The interesting thing for the student of Voegelin in this context is how

his approach, because it is not wedded to the idea that revelation only occurs through the Church,

cuts through these tangled intellectual problems and supports the “paradox” of a natural creature

with a supernatural longing and end. While Voegelin thus supports de Lubac on the nature of the

human person, Voegelin and de Lubac have very different approaches to the question of the

relationship between theology and philosophy, with Voegelin taking what from the perspective

of the Church is a very heterodox position, and de Lubac, despite his Surnaturel thesis, repeated

in AMT and TMS, upholding the “traditional,” “orthodox position.”

De Lubac’s own reply to Feingold would be that the sharp distinction Feingold draws

between the natural and the supernatural orders certainly makes sense—but it does not apply to

the case of man, who alone of God’s creatures has a paradoxical nature, living in time, yet

122
Milbank, op. cit., 25-27, n. 10. Milbank also believes that Humani Generis “traumatized” de Lubac, and that in
AMT and TMS, de Lubac “watered down” his Surnaturel thesis because of the troubles it had provoked within the
Church. Ibid., 7ff.

54
 123
somehow participating in and longing for the timeless. And, de Lubac would continue, we

know this “paradox” because it is us. We experience it, not in the sense in which we experience

objects in the material world, but in the sense that we are it. 124 We exist within the “luminosity”

123
Living in the Metaxy, as Voegelin would say.
124
In TMS, de Lubac says: “For this desire [for God] is not some ‘accident’ in me. It does not result from some
peculiarity, possibly alterable, of my individual being, or from some historical contingency whose effects are more
or less transitory. A fortiori it does not in any sense depend upon my deliberate will. It is in me as a result of my
belonging to humanity as it is, that humanity which is, as we say, ‘called.’ For God’s call is constitutive. My finality,
which is expressed by this desire, is inscribed upon my very being as it has been put into this universe by God.”
TMS, op. cit., 54-55.
And later in the same work: “My destiny is something ontological, and not something I can change as
anything else changes its destination.” Ibid., 62.
Quoting, among others, Paul Ricoeur, de Lubac says: “. . . this different kind of creature [man] has that
‘unstable ontological constitution’ which makes it at once something greater and something less than itself. Hence
that kind of dislocation, that mysterious lameness, due not merely to sin, but primarily and more fundamentally to
being a creature made out of nothing which, astoundingly, touches God. ‘Like God in its mind’ . . . At once, and
inextricably, both ‘nothing’ and ‘image’; fundamentally nothing, yet none the less substantial image. ‘Being an
image is not accidental to man, but rather substantial.’” Ibid., 113-14.
And, contra Cajetan, man’s orientation towards God is not “due to some secret transformation of man
brought about historically by grace.” Ibid., 70, n. 52, quoting Father Pierre Rousselot.
At times, de Lubac’s rage against the position he is fighting appears more on the surface: “The principle
that human nature . . . cannot have a real desire, a truly ontological desire, for any end but the end which it is capable
of giving itself or which it can require as of right by forces at its own level: this principle, treated by so many
modern scholastics as a first principle, is simply, as Père Guy de Broglie says, a ‘false piece of evidence.’ ‘A truth of
simple common sense and complete satisfaction,’ says one of its protagonists, Père Pedro Descoqs, who supposes
that he is thereby giving it authority. That indeed is precisely what it is: the fruit of that kind of dormant common
sense which shuts the door to all truth, the fruit of that superficial ‘common sense’ which rejects any paradox on the
grounds of its being ‘incoherent’ and a ‘misuse of words,’ and the fruit of that cheap ‘common sense’ which is
forever watering down Christianity, but which Christianity knocks sideways whenever it is taken seriously, either in
thought or in life . . .” Ibid., 160-61.
De Lubac goes so far as to compare the ontology of his theological opponents to that of Karl Marx: “Man,
say our new theologians, our ‘common sense’ theologians, only desires the end he can attain. . . . Man, says Marx
similarly, never sets himself any problems he cannot resolve.” Ibid., 162.

55
 125
of this experience, to use another Voegelinian term. “[T]he whole of ancient tradition,” says

de Lubac, “consist[s] in emphasizing the essential difference that there is on this question

between the beings of nature, and the soul which is open to the infinite . . . where Aristotle could

see an analogy, Christian philosophy [in the form of Neoscholasticism] saw principally a

contrast.” 126 And again: “Although inserted in nature, man was nevertheless not simply a natural
127
being. . . . [man is] this paradoxical being.” “The inborn grandeur and wretchedness of the
128
spiritual creature! . . . [In man, we find] the close union of dependence and nobility.” The

relationship of the creature with a rational nature to his or her Creator is one “both of dependence

Along the same lines, de Lubac speaks of “human nature” as “a mixed nature, compounded of body and
mind, sensuality and reason, paradoxically made up of an immortal soul and a corruptible body.” AMT, op. cit.,
223-24.
125
In In Search of Order, Voegelin says that “The equivocation [in language] is induced by the paradoxical structure
of consciousness and its relation to reality. . . . Consciousness . . . has the structural aspect not only of intentionality
but also of luminosity.” Op. cit., 15. See also, David Walsh, The Modern Philosophical Revolution: The Luminosity
of Existence (Cambridge University Press, 2008).
126
AMT, op. cit., 169.
127
Ibid., 170.
128
Ibid., 174. De Lubac later criticizes the concept of “obediential power” as applied by Neoscholastics to the
question of the finality of the spiritual creature, as opposed to the means of its attainment, as something “not only
purely passive . . . but purely negative: a mere word to denote the ‘non-repugnance,’ the non-resistance of every
creature to divine Omnipotence . . . The supernatural and the miraculous will no longer be only analogous in certain
features and are interdependent in their existence. The miraculous will no longer be a simple sign of the former: it is
the former which will become simply a special case of the latter.” Ibid., 200. He contrasts “obediential power” with
Aquinas’s statement that “the justification of the ungodly is not miraculous, because the soul is naturally capable of
grace; since from its having been made to the likeness of God, it is fit to receive God by grace . . .” ST, I-II, Q. 113,
A. 10. De Lubac would say, with Bartholomew Mastrius (1602-1673), “that there is a certain relationship of man to
the vision of God which is ‘more intrinsic, more essential and more connatural’ than is stated by Suarez and the
other modern theologians when they speak of obediential power; therefore, it is legitimate to speak of ‘really natural
power,’ that is ‘which flowed from the principles of nature,’ while being obediential by the fact that it is
‘supernatural with respect to attainment.’” AMT, op. cit., 207.

56
 129
and kinship which have no analogy in the rest of creation.” In the Christian tradition, man is

the “great abyss.” 130

Man cannot have a merely “natural beatitude,” de Lubac says. “. . . apart from the vision

of God, man, remaining inevitably unfulfilled, has no real end in the true sense . . . Left to nature

alone, in other words remaining forever ‘imperfectus,’ he would be condemned never to know

more than a ‘kind of anxious joy,’ which would consist in ‘always poeticizing reality by

dreaming,’ and ‘expanding possession by desire,’ while continuing to call upon ‘an indifferent
131
and silent heaven.’” This reminds us of Voegelin, with reference to Heraclitus and Robert

Musil, referring to those who live in the “dream world,” the “second reality,” those who structure

our modern politics.

“To sum up,” says de Lubac, “in order to gain a coherent and simple picture of our

subject, the intelligence must free itself of two errors of imagination: thinking of God in the same
132
way as man, and thinking of man in the same way as a ‘natural being.’”

De Lubac is completely on the side of the “mystery of the supernatural,” which is also the

“mystery of Christianity,” and if there is anything our systematizing and positivistic age rejects,

it is the very concept of mystery. “The whole of tradition tells us this: it is one of the forms of the

fruitfulness of the mystery that it gives birth in man’s mind to a movement which can never end.

To be afraid of it is a failure of faith. The believing intellect fearlessly gives itself to this work, in

a trusting humility, well aware that, far from ever bringing into doubt the truth of the mystery

129
Ibid., 252.
130
Ibid., 254.
131
TMS, op. cit., 199.
132
TMS, op. cit., 163.

57
which it first recognizes and then permanently holds to, it tends only to show it more profoundly

and more wonderfully.” 133

De Lubac, like Voegelin, is explicit that the “paradox” is a mystery that will never be

exhausted in any formulation, or overcome this side of death:

We certainly shall not find a wholly satisfying position. Such positions, in

regard either to basic human problems or to the essential requirements for
understanding the faith, do not exist. Therefore this can only be the start of a
reflection which, though firmly based and with a definite direction, is none the
less destined never to come to any final conclusion. The human mind is so
made—and it would be a lack of humility to dispute it—that though it can
criticize its own representations (once it has become aware of them), it cannot
replace them so easily with others. With methodical study it can discover just
what is inadequate about those representations: Indeed it is in this activity, this act
of identifying its own weakness, that its greatness is most apparent—for it is only
in being judged that its weakness can be seen. But, on the other hand, the intellect
will never produce the perfect formula which will bring its quest to an end. To do
so would be to quit its human condition. That is why it may appear to us at some
moments that this kind of work of critical reflection is something negative. . . .
. . . The life of the mind cannot be conceived without an element of
constant seeking. “As long as we live, we necessarily must always seek.” As with
the life of the body, it cannot help giving rise to “restlessness.” This is so even in
the firmest declaration of faith. The proclamation of every dogma is like the
lifting of every seal in the Apocalypse: “It is a kind of unleashing of problems on
to mankind.” . . . Only the activity of God is without movement—if one can
express it thus, and, conversely, only death is “wholly restful.” Our intellect
therefore doubts itself. In that seeking which is always “restlessness,” and in that
restlessness which is for ever an inner “dispute,” it is afraid of finding itself
divided within, of no longer recognizing itself, of finding itself drawn incessantly
into a spiral of problems. It is afraid of inducing vertigo in itself. 134

133
Ibid., 166.
134
Ibid., 163-64. De Lubac also makes reference here to St. Augustine (“Faith seeks, intellect finds . . . and in turn
the intellect still seeks him whom it found”); to St. Thomas (“St. Thomas says of the believer: ‘the motion of his
thinking remains restless in him,’ and indeed he himself gave the example ‘of a dialectic so active, of such a wind of
indefinite discussion, that he learnt, as it has been said, to pose as many problems as he solved.’); and to Hugh of St.
Victor (“His dispute itself afflicts [man]. Deservedly, for dispute always means restlessness and controversy. . . .
And this restlessness is itself a great dispute that man has in his instability, so that he does not feel it, since he is
divided and alienated so that he is not one whole. Consider now the great dispute that man works on earth. It is
multiple, and drawn out, and excessively complex; with the result that it cannot easily come to an end until man
himself receives his end . . .”).

58
 135
Still, faith itself gives thought its true direction. Furthermore: “Faith has its own light,

which can be far brighter in the intellect of a simple believer than in that of the finest
136
theologian.” Nor is genuine dogma to be denied its rightful place. While the “intellectual

worth” of dogmatic formulations “may not be great,” “Yet to accept them, to give them a place

while discerning their limitations, is not pure pragmatism, for they are useful not merely for this

or that reason, but for the preservation of a truth. Though limited, their truth value is far from

non-existent. Simply to reject them would result in error.” 137 But the danger with dogma is that,

“by producing too facile a solution,” dogma may “blur the paradox of faith.” 138 One cannot “rest

content” with dogmatic formulations. 139

Further on how de Lubac would reply to Feingold, in TMS, in contending against the

purely hypothetical state of “pure nature” posited by his opponents, De Lubac insists, as does

Voegelin, on the reality of concrete experience:

In me, a real and personal human being, in my concrete nature—that nature I have
in common with all real men . . . the “desire to see God” cannot be permanently
frustrated without an essential suffering. To deny this is to undermine my entire
Credo. For is not this, in effect, the definition of the “pain of the damned”? And
consequently—at least in appearance—a good and just God could hardly frustrate
me, unless I, through my own fault, turn away from him by choice. The infinite
importance of the desire implanted in me by my Creator is what constitutes the
infinite importance of the drama of human existence. 140

The references to “restlessness” in de Lubac, and in the Christian theologians he cites, remind one of
Voegelin’s use of the term in “Reason: The Classic Experience,” with the significant difference that Voegelin was
interpreting primarily Aristotle rather than any Christian text.
135
Pope John Paul II remarked in his encyclical, Fides et Ratio, on the ironic fact that faith has become the only
support of reason in a “postmodern” age.
136
TMS, op. cit., 165.
137
Ibid.
138
Ibid., 166.
139
Ibid.
140
TMS, op. cit., 54.

59
 To better understand the real relationship that nature has with that which is above it, de

Lubac points out that Aquinas distinguishes two ways in which the word “natural” can be used:

Something is said to be natural in two ways: (1) A sufficient principle exists from
which it follows necessarily unless something interferes. In this sense it is natural
for the element earth to move downward. . . . (2) Something is called natural for a
thing—because it has a natural inclination to it, although it does not have within
itself a sufficient principle from which it necessarily follows. 141

The “natural desire” for God is an instance of this second use of the word “natural.”

De Lubac also uses an Article from the Summa Theologica to further illustrate the
142
paradox that is the human person. The Article is entitled, “Whether man can attain happiness

by his natural powers?,” and in it St. Thomas, in his turn, makes use of Aristotle’s Ethics and De

Caelo. The Article includes the following:

Objection 1. It would seem that man can attain Happiness by his natural
powers. For nature does not fail in necessary things. But nothing is so necessary
to man as that by which he attains the last end. Therefore this is not lacking to
human nature. Therefore man can attain Happiness by his natural powers.
...
Objection 2. Further, since man is more noble than irrational creatures, it
seems that he must be better equipped than they. But irrational creatures can attain
their end by their natural powers. Much more therefore can man attain Happiness
by his natural powers.
...
Reply to Objection 1. Just as nature does not fail man in necessaries,
although it has not provided him with weapons and clothing, as it provided other
animals, because it gave him reason and hands, with which he is able to get these
things for himself; so neither did it fail man in things necessary, although it gave
him not the wherewithal to attain Happiness: since this it could not do. But it did
give him free-will, with which he can turn to God, that He may make him happy.
"For what we do by means of our friends, is done, in a sense, by ourselves"
(Ethic. iii, 3).
Reply to Objection 2. The nature that can attain perfect good, although it
needs help from without in order to attain it, is of more noble condition than a
nature which cannot attain perfect good, but attains some imperfect good,

141
De Veritate, Q. 24, A. 10, ad. 1.
142
ST, I-II, Q. 5, A. 5. See also ST, I-II, Q. 91, A. 4, ad. 3.

60
 although it need no help from without in order to attain it, as the Philosopher says
(De Coel. ii, 12). Thus he is better disposed to health who can attain perfect
health, albeit by means of medicine, than he who can attain but imperfect health,
without the help of medicine. And therefore the rational creature, which can attain
the perfect good of happiness, but needs the Divine assistance for the purpose, is
more perfect than the irrational creature, which is not capable of attaining this
good, but attains some imperfect good by its natural powers.

De Lubac, citing Dominic Soto (1499-1560), says: “The desire [to see God] is not to be

defined by its effect but rather by its cause; therefore it will be called natural not because man

could naturally elicit it, but because nature has placed it in him. In like manner, the end will be

called natural, not because he could attain to it naturally but only because it is desired by this

natural desire.” 143

In affirming de Lubac’s, and Aquinas’s, position, we might also cite these passage from

the Summa Contra Gentiles:

Again, it is impossible for natural desire to be unfulfilled, since “nature

does nothing in vain.” [Citing Aristotle, De Caelo, II, 11 (291b 13).] Now, natural
desire would be in vain if it could never be fulfilled. Therefore, man’s natural
desire is capable of fulfillment, but not in this life, as we have shown. So, it must
be fulfilled after this life. Therefore, man’s ultimate felicity comes after this life.
144

. . . those things which know and apprehend perpetual being desire it with
natural desire. And this is true of all intelligent substances. Consequently, all
intelligent substances, by their natural appetite, desire to be always. That they
should cease to be is, therefore, impossible. 145

143
AMT, op. cit., 123. In a footnote, de Lubac quotes Soto: “the restlessness of the human mind . . . abundantly
makes faith our natural end.” Ibid., 123, n. 85. As noted, the “restlessness of the human mind” is what Voegelin
focuses on in his explication of Aristotle in “Reason: The Classic Experience,” op. cit.
144
SCG, Book 3, Ch. 48.
145
Ibid., Book 2, Chapter 55. See also, ST, I, Q. 75, A. 6, which is also on the immortality of the soul.

61
 To return to AMT, de Lubac enlists numerous theologians down the centuries in support

of his reading of St. Thomas, and his view on the single end of man and the impossibility of a

state of “pure nature,” and discusses other theological views as well. 146

In discussing those who prepared the way for or expanded upon the theology of Denys

and Cajetan, De Lubac “blames” Duns Scotus (1266-1308) for having confused the issue very

soon after Thomas:

While holding in all essentials the same desire for the vision of God as held by St.
Thomas, Scouts was wrong perhaps to put it forward too insistently in opposition
to a wholly “elicited” desire, like a “weight of nature” . . . analogous to what
could be, according to the ideas prevailing at the period, the obscure desire of a
brute beast or a stone. Fundamentally, of course, it was only an analogy, but the
spiritual element was not sufficiently taken into account. To the former distinction
of a natural or necessary desire and an elective or free desire—the one “physical,”
the other “moral”—there now succeeded, from another viewpoint, or there was
added, the Scotist distinction of an innate appetite or an “elicited” act of desire.
Consequently, in criticizing this innate appetite, considered as crude appetite, as
“weight of nature,” some Thomist theologians seemed more or less to deny any
real natural desire. . . . With Scotus’s “innate appetite” . . . was contrasted an
“elicited appetite” . . . an unsatisfactory expression, not in accordance with former
usage, and one which Soto for his part still avoided. . . . But soon theologians
were no longer so particular.
Now this was not to remain merely a question of terminology nor of point
of view. It was a thorough change. 147

It will be recognized that this is the terminology used by Feingold in his criticism of de

Lubac’s position. However, says de Lubac: “On the basis of a natural desire that can be observed

[Aquinas] sets out to show reflexively what could be called the ontological appetite of
148
intellectual substance, practically identical with its finality. To reduce [the thought of St.

Thomas] to the clumsy affirmation of an ‘elicited appetite’ without deep roots in the nature of the

146
In addition to Soto, de Lubac cites Francis Toletus (1532-96) favorably as having taken an approach similar to
Soto’s. AMT, op. cit., 136ff.
147
Ibid., 124-25.
148
Here de Lubac cites ST, I-II, Q. 3, Art. 8, and SCG, Book 3, Ch. 50ff.

62
soul is to deprive his thought of all its significance.” 149 To “deprive [the thought of St. Thomas]

of all its significance” is a serious matter indeed. Yet that is what happened, according to de

Lubac, with the Neoscholastics.

The next theologian after Cajetan who makes an advance on the theory that de Lubac

rejects is Robert Bellarmine (1542-1621). 150 It was Bellarmine, says de Lubac, who asserted the

idea of “pure nature” in principle. “For long past and in many ways it had been preparing to

emerge. Nevertheless, it can be asserted . . . that ‘Bellarmine is its creator.’” 151 But, continues de

Lubac, “Bellarmine remained faithful to Augustinianism. The distinction that he had been

obliged to make [between nature and grace] occurred only at the level of abstract theory; it did

not destroy for him the unity of the spiritual being and it did not affect its movement at the

deepest level.” 152

With the next theologian considered by de Lubac with disfavor, Francis Suarez (1548-
153
1617), “the new theory . . . took a gigantic new step forward.” For Suarez, the Aristotelian

principle that the end of a natural being is always in strict proportion to its means is “an absolute
154
principle,” and it applies “absolutely” even in the case of man. Man therefore is made for a

purely natural beatitude. If he is called to a higher end, this higher end must be thought of as
155
“superadded.” And a natural desire for such an end is, according to Suarez, simply

impossible. In his time, Suarez rejected the maxim that man has a finality that is natural with

respect to appetite, supernatural with respect to attainment, as Father Reginald Garrigou-

149
AMT, op. cit., 125.
150
Ibid., 149ff.
151
Ibid., 152.
152
Ibid., 157.
153
Ibid.
154
Ibid., 158.
155
Ibid.

63
Lagrange (1877-1964), one of de Lubac’s principal twentieth century theological opponents, was

also to do much later. The theory of Suarez excludes traditional “natural desire.” 156

For Suarez and those who followed him, the desire to see God was not eliminated

entirely, nor could it have been. It was, however, fundamentally changed. “It could only be a

question, they explain, of a purely elicited and conditioned desire, of a certain imperfect desire

like some vague willingness. It is a ‘velleity,’ a ‘wish’ such as arises spontaneously in the mind

in connection with all sorts of impossible things which, moreover, are not of essential interest. It

is a desire that cannot procure a real uneasiness in relation to its object which, in the natural state,

and on the supposition that it can be known, would be acknowledged as a mere vain
157
imagination.” It is like the desire of a young child to see a unicorn. And this is the way so

many of our contemporaries think of God. It would be nice if such a thing existed, but let us face

the hard reality of life without illusion. This is why people, even people of faith, so often talk of

religion as a “purely private matter,” and why people without faith often think religious people

are completely irrational, even dangerous, and to be kept out of the public square at all costs.

This is the beginning of fideism.

On the subject of “a real uneasiness,” Suarez says, contra de Lubac, and Voegelin: “By

existing in pure nature, although a man conceives some conditioned desire for that vision [of

God], if he should act prudently, he would not be restless, but content with his natural fate . . .”
158 159
I have tried this. It is not possible. De Lubac points out that “St. Thomas insisted on the

156
John of St. Thomas (1589-1644) is another significant theologian mentioned by de Lubac as agreeing with
Suarez.
157
AMT, op. cit., 162.
158
Ibid., quoted 162-63, n. 55.
159
De Lubac later cites Estius (1542-1613): “He [Estius] raises the following objection: a man, left by God ‘in pure
nature’ . . . ought to be able to attain to some form of natural beatitude as to his last end; but this is impossible: how

64
‘restlessness’ (inquietudo); Suarez, denying it, thinks that he understands St. Thomas perfectly.

The latter said: ‘No one tends toward that which he perceives as impossible’ (De Malo, qu. 16,
160
art. 3); Suarez concludes that the desire of God does not constitute a real inclination.”

“New ideas,” says de Lubac, “are almost always older in origin than is thought . . . Those

who lay the foundations do not yet perceive the consequences which will later appear to be more

proximate and obvious. At the beginning of the sixteenth century the complete system of pure

nature, therefore, had probably not yet emerged; but the ‘divorce’ which it was to sanction had

already begun.” 161

Reminders of the “ancient tradition” became “increasingly rare among professional

theologians. . . . The mystics alone, because their teaching was not taken very seriously, were

allowed to remember it.” 162 One is reminded again of Voegelin, who noted the split in Christian

theology after Thomas between propositional doctrine and what he regarded as its ultimately

mystical origin. Says de Lubac: “The systemization, the complexity was to increase.” 163

De Lubac goes so far as to attribute a “bad conscience” to certain of the Neoscholastics

who tried to “get around” the actual text of St. Thomas by putting forward several

“contradictory” explanations of their own positions, “without troubling to choose among them,

for the sole purpose of getting out of the difficulty [they had created] at all costs. The attempts

provide evidence of a resourceful and fertile ingenuity which was exercised most of the time in

could he live in happiness when he has always to fear the hour of death, with no hope of finding happiness in an
after-life . . .” Ibid., 178. Estius also, “in declared opposition to Cajetan, thought it at least probable that man tends
by an innate natural desire to the vision of God, this being the ‘end’ of every spiritual being, the ‘natural center,’
outside of which he is doomed to remain in a constant state of unrest.” Ibid., 180.
160
Ibid., 162-63, n. 55.
161
Ibid., 167.
162
Ibid., 179.
163
Ibid., 183.

65
 164
opposition to mere objectivity.” De Lubac goes on to cite examples from Cajetan, Domingo

Báñez (1528-1604), Silvester Ferrariensis (1474-1528), Nicolas Ysambert (1565 or 1569-1642),

165
the Jesuit Navarro, and the Dominican Medina. “In short, one after the other, concurrently, or

one at choice, all the hypotheses are envisaged to evade a doctrine which St. Thomas stated in

very clear terms, and which he rightly regarded as fundamental. The men who did this were not

his opponents or indifferent to him; they were his disciples, those who declared themselves to be
166
the sole genuine heirs of the master.” In looking for an explanation as to why Aquinas’s

professed “disciples” “did this to him,” de Lubac rejects the thesis that it “[arose] from a greater

concern for the supernatural character of our destiny, a supernatural character which St.
167
Thomas’s text did not in their view fully safeguard[.]” “I believe,” de Lubac says, “that the
168
profound, and unnoticed, reason is rather the reverse. Towards the end of the fifteenth

century, in the first period of the Renaissance, a feverish enthusiasm for philosophy infected

certain minds. A large number of Christian thinkers were won over at that time by the renascent
169
naturalism.” While St. Thomas had in the thirteenth century effectively opposed this sort of

thing “with his continuation of St. Augustine and his Christianization of Aristotle,” the

164
Ibid., 208.
165
Ibid., 208-11.
166
Ibid., 211.
167
Ibid., 212.
168
Here de Lubac cites Whitehead’s Science in the Modern World: “When you are criticizing the philosophy of an
epoch, do not chiefly direct your attention to those intellectual positions which its exponents feel it necessary
explicitly to defend. There will be some fundamental assumptions which adherents of all the various systems within
the epoch unconsciously presuppose.”
169
AMT, op. cit., 212.

66
 170
theologians won over to a naturalistic philosophy were “frightened” by it. Cajetan serves as

de Lubac’s example:

As a sincere believer he [Cajetan] did not of course reject the supernatural.

But he relegated it to the class of things deemed miraculous, that is, he placed it
among the arbitrary exceptions with which the philosopher had not to concern
himself, even within the boundaries of faith, in his reasoning. And so we have the
attenuated, corrected and sincere form of the celebrated theory known as that of
the “twofold truth.” Theology thus became a special branch studied side by side
with philosophy. There was no longer a Christian idea of man. “The living image
of the living God” was forgotten. 171

This “divorce” of theology from philosophy is of course a subject which greatly

concerned Voegelin, who approached it differently than de Lubac. But Voegelin would have

agreed with de Lubac’s assessment of the implications of the position de Lubac criticizes:

It [the radical separation of the natural and supernatural orders effected by

Neoscholasticism] formed one of the signs of that break in unity characteristic of
the end of the Middle Ages and the coming of a new world. In its own way, at the
intellectual level, it betokens the manifold disintegration of Christendom which,
despite certain more favorable trends, forms so somber an introduction to the
modern period. Theology had reigned as queen of the sciences, and on occasion it
had possibly taken unfair advantage of its title. Now it was beginning to lose its
position; after dominating the whole of knowledge it was tending to become
merely a separate branch. The supernatural end which is, so to say, the keystone
of the arch, was no longer that of philosophy. The study of man was cut in two
parts, the second of which no longer had roots in the first, and in this way an
essentially good movement was dangerously perverted towards differentiation in
the analysis of reality, and towards the recognition of an increasing autonomy at
the various levels of human activity. 172

Voegelin would also have agreed with de Lubac that the development of the “twofold

separation” bore as “its fruits--the separation of independent philosophy and traditional theology,

and, within the latter, the separation of Scholastics from spirituals. The second was already old;

the first had been taking shape for some time; in practice it was realized with Montaigne, until

170
Ibid.
171
Ibid., 212-13.
172
Ibid., 214-15.

67
the process was complete doctrinally with Descartes.” 173 And Voegelin would have agreed with

de Lubac that more than a simple “recasting” of St. Augustine or even St. Thomas was

necessary, that “It is certainly a pity that there was not to be found a great mind to carry out this

recasting with full awareness of the task in hand, preserving at the same time the sense of
174
tradition in the new system.” In fact Voegelin, in decrying the separation of mysticism and

nominalist reason in the Late Middle Ages, put the matter very succinctly: “Obviously it is a task
175
that would require a new Thomas rather than a neo-Thomist.” But, alas, a new Thomas was
176
nowhere to be found. De Lubac continued to hope that one would appear, or that even a

genuine recovery of St. Augustine would occur. He certainly did his best to nudge Christian

theology in such a direction from his position “inside” the Church. “But for this,” de Lubac said,

“more than knowledge was required; a power of spiritual re-invention would have been

necessary of a kind that is hardly to be thought of at their [certain theologians after the sixteenth

century] time. They were merely preservers of the tradition, and that is not the best way to be

traditional. Their Augustinianism was not exactly false, but it was incomplete and somewhat

arid.” 177 Echoes, again, of Voegelin.

De Lubac regarded the separation of the natural from the supernatural as “fatal”: “Was

not the relative autonomy which it granted to nature, as it defined it, a temptation to

173
Ibid., 230.
174
Ibid., 231.
175
Eric Voegelin, From Enlightenment to Revolution, ed. John H. Hallowell (Durham, North Carolina: Duke
University Press, 1975), 22. De Lubac later cites a theologian de Lubac considers to have been intemperate in his
remarks, but correct in his approach, who said that it was the “pernicious system” of “pure nature-two ends” that
gave rise to the distinction of natural religion and revealed religion, to the greatest detriment of religion (AMT, op.
cit., 260), a distinction with which Voegelin also dealt.
176
Ibid., op.cit., 231ff.
177
Ibid., 251.

68
independence? Did it not encourage in this way the ‘secularization’ let loose at the Renaissance
178
and already anticipated in the preceding centuries by the Averroist movement?” For de

Lubac, the “dualism” thus established was not conceivable, nor did this intellectual formulation

even succeed in maintaining in all its completeness the idea of the supernatural. This dualism

created a state in which only commutative justice—rather than charity—reigned. The

supernatural was now conceived of as a “’supernature,’” “’a sort of second storey carefully

placed on top of lower nature by the heavenly Architect,’ without discerning in it at the outset

what is above all nature.” 179

In the concluding Chapter of AMT, de Lubac says that in ensuring that grace should

prevail “over one region of human activity . . . it [Neoscholasticism] exposed another whole
180
region to the danger of secularization.” Baianism and Jansenism were refuted, but at the cost

of man now being conceived as self-sufficient. “Only in the next place was an entirely contingent

and wholly extrinsic supernatural order conceived which was placed above the natural order
181
regarded in advance and in its very fulfillment as the normal and proper human order.” The

system de Lubac criticizes finally “destroyed the whole of the ancient anthropology” that is the
182
basis of the fundamental agreement between de Lubac and Voegelin.

The “desire to see God” . . . which for so long, both for the Fathers and the
Scholastics, had been the primary explanatory principle of man, and with man, of
the whole of nature, this king-pin of Christian philosophy could not withstand the
blows that fell upon it. The theologians who attacked it did so with all the greater
ferocity in that they were as if hypnotized by the peril that the Baianist doctrine
had caused to the faith, then by the increasing unbelief on all sides, and finally by
the rising tide of immanentism in its many forms. They imagined that in this way

178
Ibid., 233.
179
Ibid., 234, quoting Karl Rahner.
180
Ibid., 240.
181
Ibid.
182
Ibid., 261.

69
 they were waging a holy war in the name of Christian orthodoxy, thus preventing
the salt of doctrine from losing its savor. Actually, without their realizing it, they
were losing valuable ground, in some degree yielding to the prevalent naturalism
and making the most dangerous of concessions to a world entirely unconcerned
about its higher destiny.
But the more they conceded, the more they were obliged to continue to do
so. The idea of “pure nature,” when seen in isolation, became ever more
demanding. . . . Their system became increasingly top-heavy and closed in upon
itself. By this new sword of Solomon man “was cut into two parts.” Obviously,
the supporters of a separate philosophy were to find an advantage in this. What
had been established by the theologians as a doctrinal safeguard was made by
these philosophers into a fundamental objection. 183
184
The natural order became the only “legitimate subject of thought.” “Supernature,” in

contrast with “nature” conceived as “pure nature,” “came to seem to jealous reason only a vain

shadow, a sham adornment. In proportion as the one became a complete system, the other

seemed to the thinker to become superfluous. . . . But the theologians were caught in their own

trap. By some of them, as much indeed by the philosophers, the supernatural was to be rejected,

exiled or hunted down. . . . All philosophical reflection which might possibly allow the mind to

glimpse something of the mystery of the supernatural was forbidden. . . . And so it was that

Christians in a kind of sacred frenzy destroyed with their own hands the magnificent edifice
185
whose preservation the centuries of faith had handed down to them.” While modern

philosophers are often “blamed” for their “invention” of immanentism and secularism, they

simply took over ideas already regnant in Christian theology. “The separate philosophies, which

had themselves become secularized theologies, owe much to ‘separate theology.’” 186

183
Ibid., 261-62.
184
Ibid., 264.
185
Ibid., 264-65.
186
Ibid., 265. De Lubac goes on to commend the Church herself for not officially sanctioning the position he is
condemning, notwithstanding the Humani Generis controversy. Ibid., 266ff. In fact, de Lubac says that “The
encyclical Humani Generis in 1950 showed the same prudence as the earlier documents,” and, citing the particular
passage that so many read as a condemnation of de Lubac himself—it is contrary to the “real gratuity of the

70
 In one of his most relevant remarks on Christian theology, Voegelin recounts a similar

development in Christian theology, with similar consequences:

. . . the symbol “reason” has undergone, since the time of Plato, substantial
changes of meaning through the movements of Christian theology and of
Enlightenment rationalism. Christian theology has denatured the Platonic Nous by
degrading it imaginatively to a “natural reason,” a source of truth subsidiary to the
over-riding source of revelation; by an act of imaginative oblivion the revelatory
tension in Plato’s vision of the Nous as the “third god” was eclipsed, in order to
gain for the Church a monopoly on revelation. But history has taken its revenge.
The nonrevelatory reason, imagined by the theologians as a servant, has become a
self-assertive master. In historical sequence, the imagined nonrevelatory reason
has become the real antirevelatory reason of the Enlightenment revolt against the
Church. The resistance to the social power of intellectually inert, self-assertive
institutions has motivated the acts of imaginative oblivion that eclipse the noetic-
revelatory truth preserved in ecclesiastical doctrines that have become inflexible.
Moreover, since Enlightened resisters can no more than anybody else escape the
structure of consciousness, they had to arrogate the authority of noetic truth for
their resistance to it; in the form of the various ideologies, resistance to noetic
truth, understanding itself as resistance to “irrationality,” has become the
ultimately legitimizing source of truth revealed. The usurped monopoly of
revelation has migrated from the ecclesiastical institutions to their ideological
successor establishments, down to the revelatory “statements” through acts of
violent destruction in the contemporary movements of terrorisms 187

De Lubac draws this perceptive portrait of the man cut off from transcendence:

In that [purely natural] economy . . . all of man’s moral life would depend
exclusively on his own innate powers, exercised in full autonomy . . . Is not this
likely to end in the idea of an order of things whereby man would be cut off from
the “superior part of his soul,” his “highest faculty,” that which makes him mens .
. . Does it not lead us to suppose a being similar to that so often presented by
rationalist philosophies—both ancient and modern: a being sufficient to himself,

supernatural order” to claim that God “cannot create beings endowed with intelligence without ordering them to,
calling them to the beatific vision”—de Lubac said simply that “it repeated in especially clear terms the fundamental
truth that must be respected by theological investigation above all, but without canonizing any system,” and added
that by “setting before us once more the angelic doctor as our guide . . .the encyclical calls all . . . to an effort at
renewal that will hardly be able to leave the system of pure nature intact, at least in its prevalent form.” Ibid., 274-
75. Thus de Lubac reads the encyclical that his opponents use against him, against them. De Lubac’s reading seems
strained. At the least, de Lubac must have hoped that the Church would officially take a position on the controversy
he had stirred up and which he thought went to the heart of the Church’s mission in the modern world.
187
Voegelin, In Search of Order, op. cit., 43-44.

71
 and wishing to be so; a being who does not pray, who expects no graces, who
relies on no Providence; a being who, depending on one’s point of view, either
wants only to continue as he is, or seeks to transcend himself, but in either case
stands boldly before God—if he does not actually divinize himself—in a proud
and jealous determination to be happy in himself and by his own powers? 188

Here we recognize modern man. 189

De Lubac notes that the efforts of recovery in which he engaged cannot be the work of

one man, “and cannot be conceived as a mere return to one or another of the former positions. If

theology like dogma knows no irreversibility of time, nevertheless, again like dogma, it cannot

tolerate archaism.” 190 Voegelin’s work of recovery was to the same end.

IV. De Lubac and Voegelin on Theology and Philosophy

De Lubac concludes AMT by referring to TMS, “which is the companion volume to the

present work.” 191 We have scattered references to TMS throughout our exposition of AMT, and

188
TMS, op. cit., 46-47.
189
In TMS, de Lubac says that the Neoscholastics “. . . were dooming themselves to see [the supernatural] as merely
a kind of superstructure. It followed inevitably that man could not only have managed quite well without it, but that
even now he could with impunity disregard it. It was deprived of any hold on human thinking or existence. Christian
thought was thus bounded by a narrow circle, in a quiet backwater of the intellectual universe, where it could only
waste away. By the good offices of some of its own exponents, who were aiming to preserve its transcendence, it
became merely an ‘exile.’ . . . Reason which has been suppressed will have its revenge all too soon by declaring that
in such conditions the supernatural as presented to it, as forced upon it, is merely an illusion. In a hundred ways it
takes up again the cry of Siger of Brabant . . .” TMS, op. cit., 178. He quotes Jacques Maritain: “It seems that in the
time of William of Vair and of Charon, and later of Descartes, it was as though thinkers who were still Christian had
thought up a purely natural man whose duty was to philosophize, and upon whom was superimposed a man with the
theological virtues and a duty to merit heaven.” Ibid., 179. And here again de Lubac notes that the blame for
“modern secularization” cannot be laid at the feet of philosophers alone.
190
Ibid., 275-76. In a footnote, de Lubac continues: “The mere vital possession of dogma no longer suffices after the
denials of heresies and the questions raised thereby. Once the innocence of spontaneous thought has been lost, the
methodical labor of reflective thought is required. Precautions of a kind that our ancestors never imagined, are also
necessary. The soundness of theology depends on it.” Ibid., 276, n. 149.
191
Ibid., 277.

72
 192
much of TMS repeats matters already discussed in AMT. We note, however, that one aspect

of de Lubac’s thought that recurred throughout AMT, usually in connection with his discussions

of other theologians, and which we have not discussed above, is made more explicit in TMS--

namely, the sharp, “traditional” distinction de Lubac draws between theology and philosophy, a

distinction which separates de Lubac and Voegelin.

The titles of Chapters 6 through 9 of TMS suggest the issue. The titles are, respectively:

“The Christian Paradox of Man,” “The Paradox Unknown to the Gentiles,” “A Paradox Rejected

by Commons Sense,” and “The Paradox Overcome in Faith.” The titles suggest that de Lubac

wishes to see the “paradox” that is man as something brought to light only through Christianity.

For example, de Lubac says:

Under different forms, and with accentuations varying from one century
and school to another, Christian philosophy thus developed the concept of a
human nature which is open to receive a supernatural gift. Such a concept was
unknown, of course, in ancient philosophy. There is nothing Aristotelian about
it—though St. Thomas Aquinas, faithful to his method of conciliation and without
any historical scruple, sometimes finds ways to express it in Aristotelian terms.
But nor is it Platonic or Plotinian. Though theoretically justifiable by reason, the
fact remains that it was wholly shaped and developed in direct dependence on
Christian revelation. 193

De Lubac’s principal thesis has been that, by virtue of the nature he has been given, man,

as such, has a natural desire for God. And de Lubac has told us that this is not historically

conditioned; indeed, it could not be a matter of “history,” since it is a matter of “nature.” Man,

192
I note that TMS contains more discussion of modern theologians who agree with de Lubac. See, for example,
Chapter 10, in which de Lubac “. . . declare[s] [his] debt towards a number of contemporary Thomists who have
done a great deal since the turn of the century to set us free of the complications in which modern scholasticism had
become embroiled. The thinking they have done, based on historical investigation, has made possible a return to the
great tradition which was fairly widely forgotten or distorted during an earlier period.” Ibid., 185. Similarly,
Voegelin’s thinking on political subjects led him to recover “the great tradition which was fairly widely forgotten or
distorted” during the modern period.
193
Ibid., 119.

73
throughout all of history, including the history that preceded Christianity, is constituted by this

longing. In that, de Lubac he has been in agreement with Voegelin, whose exploration of human

history on this subject exceeds de Lubac’s in its range. And so we would expect de Lubac to say

that “human nature was, is, and always will be open to receive a supernatural gift.” But if that is

so, how does de Lubac now say that it is only “Christian philosophy” that “developed the

concept of a human nature which is open to receive a supernatural gift”? Voegelin would

certainly say that the symbols left by myth and pre-Christian philosophy “developed the concept

of a human nature which is open to receive a supernatural gift.” The “equivalences of experience
194
and symbolization in history” was one of Voegelin’s key concepts, and indeed, the way from

“compactness” to “differentiation” structures Order and History.

But de Lubac goes even farther. “Such a concept,” he says, was not even known “in

ancient philosophy.” Aristotle did not know it—although St. Thomas somewhat

“unscrupulously” “sometimes [found] ways to express it in Aristotelian terms.” Even beyond

Aristotle, de Lubac rules out Plato and Plotinus. And then he appears to completely separate

“reason” from “revelation”: “Though theoretically justifiable by reason, the fact remains that it

was wholly shaped and developed in direct dependence on Christian revelation.” Of course, the

close relationship between reason and revelation is a hallmark of Voegelin’s work.

AMT and TMS, like Surnaturel, advanced the thesis we have been discussing, which was

controversial in the Church. De Lubac’s opponents attacked him on the basis that by denying a

realm of “pure nature,” he had denied the gratuitousness of the supernatural. His opponents were

determined to maintain for the Church the idea that only through it was salvation possible—the

194
Eric Voegelin, “Equivalences of Experience and Symbolization in History,” Ch. 5 in The Collected Works of Eric
Voegelin: Volume 12: Published Essays 1966-1985, op. cit., 115ff.

74
“monopoly” Voegelin referred to in the work quoted above. Certainly de Lubac was at pains to

show that his “one end-no pure nature” thesis was grounded in the most ancient tradition of the

Church, including the Fathers, Augustine, and Aquinas, and that it was his opponents who

deviated from that tradition. But now, toward the end of TMS, the second volume of his two

volume work on the subject, de Lubac makes pronouncements that are startling to the readers

who have followed him thus far. For he tries to capture here for the Church a “monopoly” on

truth that seems contradicted by what he has said up to this point. The “paradox” of human

nature seems to become the “paradox” of only Christian human nature.

For Voegelin, on the other hand, the “paradox” does not depend on Christian revelation,

although he would say that it achieved its most complete expression in and through Christianity.

Voegelin would say that de Lubac uses “reason” in the passage just cited in its truncated sense,

in the sense in which it has come down to us from the Enlightenment. Voegelin read those whom

he considered to be real philosophers, especially Plato and Aristotle, as raising to awareness the

being of man as “paradoxical” in the same sense in which de Lubac uses the term. On Voegelin’s

reading, Plato’s work depended on his experience of periagogue, on conversion in the religious

sense. Plato’s Socrates was the man who first fully expressed the importance of the soul’s

attunement to God as the source of personal and political order. As for Aristotle, Voegelin read

the Metaphysics as the “search for the divine ground of being,” and the whole of the

Nicomachean Ethics in light of its “immortalizing” passage in Book X, Chapter 7. For Voegelin,

reason, the principal instrument of the philosophers, so far from being limited to its discursive

uses, is itself, in its highest reach, “the sensorium of the transcendence,” through which God

reveals Himself even as He is sought. And Voegelin does not even limit the awareness of the

75
“paradox,” and the development of the symbols that express this mystery, to classical

philosophy.

To give an example, relative to St. Paul and Aristotle, Voegelin said that the “all too

obvious difference of cultural context . . . must not obscure the fact that Paul strives to articulate

a dynamics of existential knowledge which Aristotle compressed in the formula that human

thought (nous) in search of the divine ground of being is moved (kineitai) by the divine Nous

who is the object of thought (noeton) of the human nous. (Metaphysics 1072a30f.).” 195

And with reference to “the puppet myth of the Laws,” Voegelin said that in the image of

“the god” who “pulls the golden chord of the Nous that is meant to move man toward the

immortalizing, noetic order of his existence . . . Plato comes so close to the helkein [pull] of the
196
Gospel of John (6: 44) that it is difficult to discern the difference.”

De Lubac’s ontology of the human person is based on the experiential insight that man

has a natural desire for God. As said above, the natural desire, being natural, must have been

there even before Christ and the graces that he merited for man, although, for the Christian,

Christ represents the fulfillment of the hope implicit in man’s natural desire. De Lubac himself

denies that the natural desire came with the grace that Christ gained. He says that “. . . there is

always the same human paradox, that fundamental paradox which forces us to recognize its
197
parallel in the Christian paradox.” De Lubac’s work was directed to overcoming the divorce

of the natural and supernatural realms caused by the theologians he opposes. But does not de

195
Eric Voegelin, “The Gospel and Culture,” Ch. 7 in The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin: Volume 12: Published
Essays 1966-1985, op. cit., 192.
196
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, op. cit., 361.
197
TMS, op. cit., 162.

76
Lubac now, in his “divorce” of philosophy and theology, bring in another sharp distinction

through the backdoor similar to the one he ushered out through the front?

In the last Chapter of TMS, de Lubac says that he does not believe that “natural reason

has the power to reveal to us that we are in fact called to the vision of God.” 198 He continues:

I want to remain firmly within theology. I am not trying to establish a

philosophical thesis, but to study a dogmatic statement and all that it implies. I do
not say that the knowledge gained by reason of a natural desire, outside any
context of faith, “proves strictly that we are called to the beatific vision,” and that
therefore we can naturally attain “the certainty that we have been created for that
end”; on the contrary, I say that the knowledge that is revealed to us of that
calling [that is, Christian revelation], which makes us certain of that end, leads us
to recognize within ourselves the existence and nature of that desire . . .
...
Man needs revelation, then, in order to know distinctly what is his last end
...
...
. . . Certain depths of our nature can be opened only by the shock of
revelation. Then, with a new clarity, deep calls upon deep. By revealing himself
to us . . . God “has revealed us to ourselves.” . . . Similarly, it is by the promise
given us of seeing God face to face that we really learn to recognize our “desire.”
...
. . . it is “Jesus Christ who reveals within us someone whom we do not
know,” it is Christ “who speaks our soul to us.” 199

Voegelin would agree with de Lubac that Christianity marks the greatest “leap in being”

in the history of mankind. God Himself crossed from the supernatural to the natural, and became

man, thereby answering man’s deepest natural desire. But here de Lubac appears to be saying

that revelation preceded the desire.

198
Ibid., 208.
199
Ibid., 209-17. De Lubac goes on to cite Aquinas at SCG, Book 2, Ch. 4, “That the Philosopher and the
Theologian Consider Creatures in Different Ways.” Ibid., 218, n. 50. Voegelin would, at least to an extent, disagree.
All of this is reminiscent of the difference between Voegelin and his great contemporary, Leo Strauss, the latter of
whom drew the sharpest of lines between philosophy and theology, reason and faith, Athens and Jerusalem. In
addition to comparing de Lubac and Voegelin, it is interesting to compare, on the one hand, the differences that
separated de Lubac and Cajetan, and on the one hand, the differences that separated Voegelin and Strauss.

77
 De Lubac goes on to draw a distinction between an “implicit desire” for God, which

somehow supposedly pre-dated Christian revelation, and the “explicit desire” awoken in man by

the coming of Christ. 200 In distinguishing Christianity from all that came before it, de Lubac also

cites the saying from St. Paul that was often used against de Lubac by his theological opponents:

“Yet among the mature we do impart wisdom, although it is not a wisdom of this age or of the

rulers of this age, who are doomed to pass away. But we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of

God, which God decreed before the ages for our glorification. None of the rulers of this age

understood this; for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. But, as it is

written, ‘What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man conceived, what God has

prepared for those who love him,’ God has revealed to us through the Spirit” 201

Further in the last Chapter of TMS, de Lubac, while acknowledging that “There is too

much evidence, throughout human history, of man’s universal desire—now more, now less

clearly formulated—for God,” also says, “But in itself that desire remains none the less hidden

‘in the ontological depths,’ and only the Christian revelation makes it possible to interpret either
202
its indications or its meaning correctly.” While statements about the desire to see God may be
203
found outside Christianity and independent of it, they are “all” “equivocal.” De Lubac

similarly in effect “dismisses” the “immortalizing” passage in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics:

. . . this has, not unjustifiably, been recognized “as a stepping-stone to the

supernatural”; but, since to Aristotle, “it is the act of rational contemplation which
constitutes that divine life in man, an act which begins and ends in ourselves,” it
would be equally justifiable to condemn it “as pure philosophy’s permanent claim
to the supreme place, however high that might be. 204

200
Ibid., 218ff.
201
1 Cor. 2: 6-10; quoted at TMS, op. cit., 220.
202
TMS, op. cit., 222.
203
Ibid.
204
Ibid., 223.

78
 Voegelin would not agree that “the act of rational contemplation” “begins and ends in

ourselves.” He would say rather that the noetic act is the opening of the soul to the divine world-

transcendent ground of being. De Lubac’s reason, which, he says elsewhere, is the natural desire

to see God, he here contracts to a purely immanent function. 205

An early Voegelin saw the truth of Christianity, “soteriological truth,” as surpassing in its

“differentiation” the truth of classical philosophy, “anthropological truth,” which in its turn had
206
surpassed in its “differentiation” “cosmological truth.” A later Voegelin, citing Justin the

Martyr, said: “. . . in his conception, the Logos of the gospel is rather the same Word of the same

God as the logos spermatikos of philosophy, but at a later state of its manifestation in history.

The Logos has been operative in the world from its creation; all men who have lived according

to reason, whether Greeks (Heraclitus, Socrates, Plato) or barbarians (Abraham, Elias), have in a

sense been Christians . . . Hence, Christianity is not an alternative to philosophy, it is philosophy

itself in its state of perfection; the history of the Logos comes to its fulfillment through the

incarnation of the Word in Christ.” 207 And then there is this:

Even this expansion of the fides, however, to all of the experiences of

divine reality in which history constitutes itself, cannot be said to go beyond
“Christianity.” For it is the Christ of the Gospel of John who says of himself:
“Before Abraham was, I am” (8: 58); and it is Thomas Aquinas who considers the
Christ to be the head of the corpus mysticum that embraces, not only Christians,
but all mankind from the creation of the world to its end. In practice this means
that one has to recognize, and make intelligible, the presence of Christ in a

205
For a comment by Voegelin on Aristotle’s “immortalizing” passage, see Eric Voegelin, “Immortality: Experience
and Symbol,” Ch. 3 in The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin: Volume 12: Published Essays 1966-1985, op. cit.,
87ff.
206
Voegelin, The New Science of Politics, op. cit.
207
Eric Voegelin, “The Gospel and Culture,” Ch. 7 in The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin: Volume 12: Published
Essays 1966-1985, op. cit., 173.

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 Babylonian hymn, or a Taoist speculation, or a Platonic dialogue, just as much as
in a Gospel. 208

De Lubac, in sharp contrast, says that Greek philosophy, which preceded the Gospel and

is often thought of as a “preparation for the Gospel,” was rather, “and in fact primarily, an
209
obstacle to it.” Furthermore, de Lubac goes on to distinguish “natural reason” from

“supernatural revelation,” a distinction drawn by many other Christian theologians, and one

which bothered Voegelin greatly: “It can certainly be said that by supernatural revelation a

superior order of truth came to be added to the truths of natural reason, but that is only true, at
210
most, at an abstract level, and in reality things are not quite so simple.” De Lubac continues:

It is good to speak of God, remarked Newman, but it is a word that

contains an entire theology, and one must make clear of what God one is
speaking. Without denigrating the value of any anticipation, or belittling in
particular, as too many people do today, the marvelous work of the man whom St.
Augustine hailed as “the father of theology” [Plato], and that of his most original
disciple [Aristotle] who produced the notion of “pure act,” one may nevertheless
have a stronger sense of the newness of Christianity. For in truth “the Christian
God is incomparable.” . . . Coming to complete and transform our idea of God
and, though we still use the same words, to transform our idea of the vision of
God, revelation cannot help at the same time transforming and completing our
idea of man and his desire, and ultimately, at least if we consent to it, of the desire
itself. 211

Voegelin would not disagree with the statement that “the Christian God is incomparable.”

But we must ask, Is this “desire” that de Lubac now speaks of the same “natural desire” he has

been defending at great length against the attacks on it mounted by Neoscholasticism? If so,

how, exactly, is it not just “completed,” but “transformed” in Christianity?

208
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., 294.
209
TMS, op. cit., 223.
210
Ibid.
211
Ibid., 223-24.

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 In connection with St. Augustine’s praise of the Platonic philosophers—that they were

able to conceive the vision of God, but not the way to get there—de Lubac asks, “must we

accuse him of attributing the knowledge of a supernatural mystery to natural reason?,” and

concludes that, “No; we must instead consider the concrete situation the Church was in in his

time, and also the apostolic intention behind his reflections. We can only marvel at the

assimilative power of Christian life as manifest in his attitude . . .” It is not that Plato and

Augustine have much in common, de Lubac is saying, but that Christianity is capable of such an

“assimilation.” The compliment to the “assimilative power” of Christianity implies the broad

divide de Lubac now sees between theology and philosophy. De Lubac continues: “In short, here

as elsewhere, we can see the truth of Etienne Borne’s observation: ‘Christian Platonism is an

historical fact; but this demanded of St. Augustine a confrontation and a combat like that

between Jacob and the angel, from which one of the protagonists, philosophy, emerged limping
212
and bearing the traces of its lucky defeat.’” Could we not say that the “defeat” of philosophy

at the hands of theology has contributed to the divorce of the natural and the supernatural that led

to the secularization that de Lubac elsewhere bemoans?

Augustine, says de Lubac, “had he analyzed his own thought more reflectively . . . would

have been the first to recognize that the knowledge of the way affects the knowledge of the goal,

and that one cannot therefore be wrong about the one without also being wrong about the other.”
213
Were Plato and Aristotle “wrong” not just about the “way,” but about the “goal” as well?

“’We need to be a bit disenchanted from Plato,’” de Lubac quotes “one of his most faithful

admirers”--not only from Plato, but “from Plato and so many other fine minds, from Aristotle on

212
Ibid., 226.
213
Ibid.

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 214
. . .” De Lubac also says that words like “desire” and “appetite” “must not be used without

great care and precision,” warning that terms like these are “too heavily dependent on the ancient

concept of ‘eros’ and the theories of ancient physics not to give rise to certain
215
misunderstandings.” If we rule out “eros” as it appears in the Symposium, we rule out metaxy

as well. De Lubac’s reading of the theology of Plato and Aristotle is certainly different than

Voegelin’s.

At one point toward the end of TMS, De Lubac says that the “desire” of which he has

been speaking “is different in kind from all the desires of our common experience,” and quotes

the mystic, St. John of the Cross, who said, “Deny your desires and you shall find what your
216
heart desires.” My response to this is that the “natural desire” to see God, of which I thought

de Lubac has been speaking, not only is not “different in kind from all the desires of our

common experience,” but it is the desire that is our common, constitutive experience as persons.

Nor does one need to be a great mystic, a St. John of the Cross, to know the experience of

longing for God. Could it be that De Lubac really was somewhat “traumatized,” as Milbank puts

it, by the suffering he was forced to undergo within the Church after the publication of

Surnaturel, and is bending over backwards at the end of his “twin” books to curry favor with

what is perceived to be “orthodox” Catholicism, and so was at pains to show that, at least as far

as the relationship between theology and philosophy was concerned, he was “orthodox”?

Certainly the concluding pages of TMS are at pains to stress the “gratuitousness” of the order of

grace, even putting in a good word about Cajetan along those lines. 217

214
Ibid., 227.
215
Ibid., 229.
216
Ibid., 230.
217
Ibid., 237.

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 As between de Lubac and Voegelin, at least part of the problem may be that for de

Lubac, the word “revelation” is univocal, but Voegelin uses the word to include things other than

Scripture. For Voegelin, “revelation” includes the experience, in the Metaxy, of “being called,”

even as we seek. “Revelation” does not have this meaning for de Lubac, or, as far as I am aware,

other orthodox Christian theologians. Nevertheless, it is somewhat disheartening to have de

Lubac proclaim, at the end of his magisterial work on the subject, that he believes that he is

“only” a “theologian,” and not also a “philosopher,” and that his study was of “only” “a

dogmatic statement.”

And it is perhaps ironic that de Lubac, who saw through the limits imposed by the

purported “orthodoxy” of a regnant Neoscholasticism, would himself limit the insight of the

“paradoxical” nature of man to Christina revelation. The one limit would seem to be related to

the other. Would Voegelin’s more expansive use of the concepts of philosophy and reason have

assisted de Lubac in his endeavor to recover the ancient sources of Christian theology and faith?

That is a fascinating question, and it opens the question of the broader relation of Voegelin to

traditional Christian theology generally. 218

218
For an example of what for Voegelin was Christian theology done very well, see his discussion of Saint Anselm
in Eric Voegelin, “The Beginning and the Beyond: A Meditation on Truth,” Ch. 5 in The Collected Works of Eric
Voegelin: Volume 28: What Is History? And Other Late Unpublished Writings,” ed. Thomas A. Hollweck and Paul
Caringella (Louisiana State University Press, 1990), 191ff.
We note as well that Voegelin’s very last work was a meditation on Question 2, Article 3 of Part I of
Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica. Eric Voegelin, “Quod Deus Dicitur,” Ch. 14 in The Collected Works of Eric
Voegelin: Volume 12: Published Essays 1966-1985, op. cit., 376ff.

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