Henri de Lubac SJ (1896-1991) was a major influence on the Second Vatican Council and on theologians such as Hans Urs von Balthasar and Joseph Ratzinger, with whom he founded the journal Communio. In 1942, he and some fellow Jesuits founded Sources chrétiennes, a series that publishes the original text of patristic and medieval Christian writings alongside a French translation. He thereby stimulated within Catholic theology a return to its sources. Putting this ressourcement into practice in his own works, he argued that the Church should retrieve the patristic understanding of the Eucharist, the Church, creation, grace, and Scripture. In 1983, Pope John Paul II created him a cardinal.
Approaching de Lubac’s vast oeuvre can be daunting. Fortunately, Dr. David Grumett is here to give an overview of de Lubac and explain what you should read first.
David Grumett is senior lecturer in theology and ethics in the University of Edinburgh. He has recently published Henri de Lubac and the Shaping of Modern Theology: A Reader with Ignatius Press.
- Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man
by Henri de Lubac - The Christian Faith: An Essay on the Structure of the Apostles' Creed
by Henri de Lubac - Christian Resistance to Anti-Semitism: Memories from 1940-1944
by Henri de Lubac - Scripture in the Tradition
by Henri de Lubac - Meet Henri de Lubac: His Life and Work
by Rudolf Voderholze
Who was Henri de Lubac and what makes him one of the most influential Catholic theologians of the 20th century.
De Lubac was a French Jesuit. He was born in 1896 and died in 1991. So, he really had an incredible lifespan. He fought in the First World War and lived to see the start of the fall of communism. His theology was rooted in the tumultuous and, if you like, short twentieth century. It begins with the problems between Church and state in France. The Jesuits are ejected from France along with the other religious orders. So, he undertakes most of his formation overseas, on the British Channel Islands and on the South Coast of England. But even though the French state expels religious orders—it does not allow them to teach in France—it nevertheless expects them to return and fight. So, he returns and is catapulted from this safe, conservative seminary into the maelstrom of war. There, he comes into contact with a far wider group of people than before. This shapes his theological engagements and concerns.
He then becomes a teacher of theology at the Catholic faculty of Lyon and lives in the Jesuit house at Fourvière. During this time, he becomes interested in fundamental theology and the wider social, even interfaith, contexts in which Christian belief is situated. He is interested in the notion of religion as well as the Christian faith.
He had already been expelled from France and come back to fight for his country. But then in the 1930s, a new challenge comes on the horizon: anti-Semitism in France. He is one of a surprisingly small number of Roman Catholic clergy and religious who from the start see that this is completely unacceptable. It is something they need to fight against. In Lyon, de Lubac plays a leading role in the spiritual resistance to anti-Semitism and to the Vichy regime during the early 1940s, at great personal danger.
When the war ended, one might have thought that he would have been thanked for his troubles by the Church hierarchy. But he quickly becomes enveloped in a controversy around theology and the idea of the supernatural. He is accused of departing from approved theology. During the 1950s, he is really a bit of an outcast. He doesn’t teach Christian theology but takes several years researching Japanese Buddhism. He sees a particular form of Buddhism in Japan, that he calls Amidism—Pure Land Buddhism as it would be called now—as interestingly echoing Christian belief.
However, de Lubac is suddenly rehabilitated in the run up to the Second Vatican Council, which took place from 1962 to 1965. He is appointed one of the French theological experts at the Council and he takes a significant role in theological conversation that contributes to the drafting of its documents, which are still tremendously important in the Church today.
In the wake of the Council, he becomes critical of what he sees as excessively liberal interpretations of its teaching. He becomes an apologist for some of the classic doctrinal loci: the importance of the Church and its hierarchy, and of sin. He is concerned, along with other clergy of his generation, such as Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, that society is moving in ways that could become destructive, and that the purpose of the Church is to speak clearly and that it must not lose sight of traditional doctrinal and moral teaching.
He is pleased at the election as Pope of John Paul II, with whom he had good interactions during the Second Vatican Council. He is delighted that someone who had a leading role, and continued to have a leading role, in the fall of communism was Pope. For him, that was an important sign and significant in the Christian combat against communism, which he saw as one of the great spiritual conflicts of the later twentieth century. He was also pleased at the appointment as Archbishop of Paris of Cardinal Lustiger, who was born a Jew and, as it says on his memorial inscription in Notre-Dame Cathedral, remained a Jew, even though he became Christian. De Lubac perhaps saw this as a rounding-off of the hostility between many Christians and Jews, and the failure of Christians to stand up for Jews in France in the earlier twentieth century, and a recognition, really, that the Christian faith comes fundamentally out of the tradition of Israel that preceded it, described in the Old Testament and by Paul in the New Testament.
You mentioned that de Lubac, after a period in exile from academic theology during the 1950s, in the wake of the encyclical Humani generis, played a role in the Second Vatican Council. Has he shaped the teaching of Vatican II and subsequent popes?
Yes, I think he has. When we look at the five books, we might see in some greater detail areas in which he has contributed. Let’s take a couple for now. Think of the importance of how the Church is seen today: not as an administrative institution, in some way paralleling the state or a government department, but as the organic living body of Christ. This was an idea that was tremendously important to de Lubac. He spent a lot of time looking into its history and he was he was highly critical of understandings of the Church that just thought of it as a bureaucratic organisation rather than Christ’s organic body, composed of the bishops and other clergy and people in it.
Also, de Lubac's approach to Scripture was extremely important in the methodology of the Council. If one looks back at the documents of previous councils, often Scripture is not cited much. There is much more citation of previous Church teaching. But de Lubac saw the relationship between Scripture and doctrine as very close. He thought we really should be returning to Scripture and understanding how doctrinal themes come out of it. He saw Christ as present in the whole of Scripture and revealed in Scripture, in some sense analogously to how Christ is present in and revealed through the Eucharistic host. If we think of worship, Christ is present in the host. But Christ is also present in Scripture. This parallelism of sacrament and word was important to him. The life of the Church is not just expressed in worship but actually comes out of worship. One of the phrases rightly associated with de Lubac is that the Eucharist makes the Church. It is through the Church’s collective prayer and worship that its identity and other areas of its life and reflection come.
What brought you do study do Lubac?
My PhD thesis was on the theology of another French Jesuit, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. He was active about fifteen years before de Lubac and was controversial in his time for his ideas about theology and evolution, and the relationship between theology and science more widely? One might think that de Lubac would not be interested in him. De Lubac might be regarded as someone deeply anchored in classical doctrine, spending most of his time writing and thinking about that. Actually, de Lubac wrote several books on Teilhard, had great respect for him, and spent a lot of time defending his fellow Jesuit from misinterpretation and false accusation.
Through having worked on one French Jesuit, I moved into working on another, perhaps the greatest of the twentieth century in terms of his impact on the Church and the importance of his work. Then, there is the sheer volume of it. The French publisher, Cerf, based in Paris, is currently publishing de Lubac’s complete works. It expects that the project will run to 50 volumes.
1.
De Lubac’s Catholicism is not only the first work on your list, but also his first published book. Joseph Ratzinger stated that reading this book in 1949 was an essential milestone in his theological journey. Why is this book so important? Why have you put it first on your list?
It is the closest de Lubac gets to a systematic theology. By that, I mean it is the closest he gets to laying out in a single volume, in a structured way, the key theological topics, as he sees them, in Christian doctrine.
Before I talk briefly about the structure of the book and its contents, I should just say that there is a big section at the back of the book, where he reproduces texts by theologians from Christian history. There is a good seventy pages where he is providing texts from the early Church Fathers and mediaeval theologians that he thinks are important for Christian doctrine today. So, this big appendix shows us a key plank of his methodology: ressourcement; re-resourcing theology for the present day, using historic sources and reconnecting theology with its roots, so it can take up again the goodness from those roots.
It is wonderful reading through some of those texts and reflecting on why he might think that each one is important.
In this book, he begins with dogma in the Church and ends with reflections on transcendence. He begins with the importance of the Church as the outworking of fundamental facts about humankind, as reflected in Christian doctrine. For de Lubac, it is important that we are all one in Adam. Humanity is essentially a collective concept. Contrary to modern individualism, de Lubac does not see humanity as lots of isolated individuals. Rather, he sees humanity as fundamentally collective. We are all created in Adam in God's image. That is why we are called into the Church, Christ’s collective, organic body.
From the Church, he talks about the sacraments, and he talks about baptism and penance before he moves on to the Eucharist. This is interesting. It reminds us that that, back when de Lubac published this in 1947, regular reception of the Eucharist was not as common among Christians as it is now. Rather, confession was the sacrament that they would often have received most frequently. Nevertheless, de Lubac quickly moves to the Eucharist. He says that this produces the Church. He reflects a bit on Christ’s different bodies. We see the body present on the altar. We have Christ’s body, now resurrected in heaven, and we have Christ’s body, the Church. For de Lubac, the correspondence between these different bodies of Christ is hugely important, and is displayed principally in the Eucharist, which leads us into eternal life.
In the second of the three parts, he looks at Christianity from a historical perspective. This is important to him because it really draws him into reflecting on why Christianity arose when it did. Why did Jesus come into the world, incarnate as a human, when he did? De Lubac sees the lead-up to this as important. For him, ancient Israel is the original type of the Church. God chooses the people of Israel, not a particularly big, privileged, wealthy, or powerful group, but a collection of small tribes. They become God’s chosen people. Israel are God’s elect people. For de Lubac, that shows a key fact about the Church. The Christians that make it up are God's chosen people.
This strong sense of continuity between ancient Israel and the Church also comes out in this part because de Lubac gives a very good overview of his understanding of Scripture.
Perhaps we have become fixated in the present day with the idea that there is a conflict between a literal interpretation of Scripture, on the one hand, and figurative one, on the other hand. It is either one or the other. However, de Lubac reflects on the mediaeval fourfold exegesis of Scripture, as he calls it. For the medievals there were at least four different ways of reading Scripture. There is the literal sense. Every book of Scripture has a narrative that might be historically true or certainly makes historical sense as a description of events. It has an allegorical sense. There are people and events in the Old Testament that can signify the Church, different parts of Christian theology, or can point us forward to Christ. Then there is the moral meaning of Scripture. Many parts of Scripture have a moral message. There is also the eschatological meaning. This is the fourth sense of Scripture that de Lubac identifies. Scripture points us toward a future consummation that that we can only dimly understand at the present. So, we cannot understand Scripture simply by looking back into past history. It challenges us by calling us forward too.
Coming back to de Lubac's collective theological anthropology, he has a strong sense that just as the creation of humans was collective— we are all one in Adam—so all humanity will be saved collectively.
The idea of collective salvation has sometimes been misunderstood as saying, “Well, those individual sins do not matter,” or, “Oh, this means that people of all religions will just be brought in and it will not matter what your faith has been during your life.” However, de Lubac says salvation is collective because of this fundamental fact about humanity being collective. That does not mean that universal salvation will be easily achieved. Very far from it. Nevertheless, he thinks that, for deep theological reasons, it is collective. So, during our lives we need to continue working for unity amongst peoples of the world and people of faith.
Somehow, everyone will be brought back together again, beyond all these divisions and conflicts we have in present life.
In the third part of Catholicism, he defends ideas about the person and about transcendence. It has become popular to think, “Well, all that exists and is true is whatever we can see with our senses in the world around us”. De Lubac very much wants to say, “No! Present reality points us upwards towards something greater, but not in a way that disconnects us from other people and from society.” As I have said a couple times already, this collective dimension is very important to him, but in a way that deepens into personal bonds and gives new meaning to all our daily interactions. He wants to put us beyond thinking that what we have, what we do, or what we achieve in earthly terms in our lives is the most important thing. No, he wants us to look upwards collectively and get a sense of what God is calling us to as a society. Those are some of the broad themes of Catholicism.
2.
The next book in your list is The Christian Faith. De Lubac published it not long after Ratzinger’s Introduction to Christianity and, like it, it is a commentary on the Apostles’ Creed. Why have you chosen it?
As you say, it is a commentary on the Apostles’ Creed. People may be aware of the legend, though it is probably no more than a legend, that each of the phrases in the Apostles’ Creed was contributed by one of the twelve apostles. However, de Lubac sees the legend as having theological significance: that this ancient creed comes out of a believing, connected community of people, faithful to Christ, reflecting on the meaning of Christ in their lives.
For de Lubac, it is important that creedal affirmation is made by a group of people in the first person. There has been a push against saying, “I believe,” in some Christian traditions. For de Lubac, the “I believe” is important because the creed is me as an individual, and other people in their individual faith, saying, “Yes, I assent to this”.
But creeds are also said, or sometimes sung, collectively in worship, A creed for de Lubac combines the sort of objectivity and universality of the belief officially endorsed by the Church with the individual’s affirmation of that belief in an act of faith.
It is important, for de Lubac, that creeds are Trinitarian. A creed is not simply like a statement in a textbook. It is a living thing. De Lubac thinks it is important that we say, “I believe in…” or, “We believe in…” This word. “in” is important because we believe in the Church, and in God the Father, and in Christ. These are the contexts for our affirmations of belief. When I say, “I believe in Jesus”, I am not just saying there is an historical figure called Jesus, who existed and continues to exist. I am saying more than that. This figure actually informs, gives content to, and motivates my belief today. For de Lubac, a creed is a living thing that we say with passion. In one place, he quotes the French poet Claudel, who reflects on how painful a process it has been to give birth to every creedal affirmation. All that conflict, misunderstanding, shared intellectual work, writing, conferences, councils, discussions. A creed is a product of a vast amount of passionate development.
One aspect that it is worth bringing out is the importance de Lubac attaches to the economic Trinity and his understanding of that. A distinction is frequently drawn between the immanent Trinity and the economic Trinity. The immanent Trinity, as it is sometimes presented, concerns truths about God, in himself. The economic Trinity relates to the actions of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit towards the world and within the world. Often theologians who focus on the economic Trinity have been accused of instrumentalizing the Trinity and of saying that all that matters is what God does for the world, rather than who God is in himself. De Lubac says, “Actually, the economic Trinity is an outworking of the immanent Trinity. It is necessarily the way we understand the immanent Trinity. So, all we can do is look at God's work in the world and work backwards from that to fundamental doctrinal truths. De Lubac argues that creeds are really expressions of the work of the Trinity economically. They are expressions of God’s work for and in the world, as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Apostles’ Creed is essentially a series of statements about God's economic activity in the world. It works backwards from that to fundamental statements about how God is in God’s self.
In this book, de Lubac wants to persuade us—and I think does so very successfully—that creeds are living active statements that give our faith life. They are shared statements of the Church. They have an important historical genesis that connects us back to the early historical roots of the Christian faith.
3.
You have already mentioned that de Lubac lived through both world wars. He served in the French army during World War I. He played a small role in the resistance during World War II, contributing to Les Cahiers du témoinage chrétien, a publication that, by his report, dedicated most of its space to combatting antisemitism. In his wartime memoirs, Christian Resistance to Anti-Semitism, he describes the French Church’s opposition to National Socialism and its antisemitism He also tells the story of his close friend and confrere Fr Yves de Montcheuil, who was killed by the Nazis for his resistance activities. Why have you chosen these memoirs?
When a lot of theologians think about resistance to Nazism, the names that come up are Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. But there is also an important Catholic story to tell here and de Lubac is part of that story.
If you go today to the Deportation Museum in Lyon, de Lubac and three of his Jesuit confreres are featured in that secular museum because their Christian contribution was seen as important in the general effort, such as it was, to resist the Nazis and the Vichy regime. There is a story to tell here that has some important contours that are characteristic of de Lubac's approach.
Some of his post-war theological works begin life as talks given and papers written in this period. “The Church’s connexion with ancient Israel is by no means simply an academic, theological matter”, he was saying in pamphlets, The reason, or one of the reasons, antisemitism is so wrong is that Christians are intimately connected with ancient Israel. There is continuity between modern Jews and ancient Israel. Antisemitism also denies the fundamental dignity of all human beings, who are created collectively in Adam. It is not the case that you can simply separate out a group of humans and say, “Oh, they are not important. We can do anything we like to them. We can liquidate them.” No! For de Lubac, the persecution of the Jews was a fundamental offence against truths of human nature.
He does a couple of important things. He and three of his confreres write a confidential memo to their Jesuit superiors because they feel the Church and the Jesuits are not speaking out sufficiently against the increasingly severe persecution of Jews. He also has quite a lot to say about the Bérard Report, as it was called in this book. This was a pseudo-theological justification of persecution of the Jews that was written by a politician intellectual, Léon Bérard. De Lubac is challenging his own Jesuit order and the Roman Catholic Church to take things more seriously. He is also calling into question directly the way that state organs were theologically justifying the persecution, or at least justifying not taking action to stop it.
Those are some of theological reasons for de Lubac's passionate concern about the Jewish persecution. What did he actually do?
Well, the Cahiers have already been mentioned. This was an underground journal directed at lay Catholics in Lyon and the surrounding area. De Lubac was one of the editors. Here we see one of the roots of his conviction that that the Church can only operate collectively as a body, including both laity and clergy working together. There is no way that the clergy and members of religious orders alone were going to stop the Nazi persecution of Jews, or even have much impact on it. But once laypeople got involved, there were massively more Catholics who could take a stand. But they needed motivation and to be taught some applied theology, if you like. What de Lubac did in his contributions to this journal was to go through some of the simple theological and biblical reasons why this persecution was wrong.
This was obviously a clandestine operation. If he had been found with copies of the journal or standing at the printing press while it was being printed, he would have been arrested and possibly executed. There was at least one occasion when authorities were coming to arrest him, but he was tipped off by someone in the prefecture, fled the building before he could be found, and went to hide in one of the Jesuit houses outside of the city.
There was an undercover distribution network for the Cahiers. They were distributed to lay Christians. One of the things that the Cahiers did was give information about Christian resistance to anti-Semitism in other countries. Some statements by Karl Barth, for instance, were published. This was also an ecumenical effort. We might even see some early intimations of the ecclesiology of the Second Vatican Council and certainly of Pope Francis, who says that the laity have a fundamental contribution to make in the Church’s witness and mission. The wartime resistance is one of the one of the points at which the Church realised this cannot be done just by clergy and members of religious orders alone. All Christians need to participate, and it is an ecumenical effort.
Yes, this book really shows that de Lubac’s theology was not just a desk task. It came out of his own faithful witness and his connections with other people. This was dangerous work. I mentioned Yves de Montcheuil a few minutes ago. He was a fellow Jesuit who was caught by the Nazis when simply visiting a group of resistance fighters who were hiding in the countryside, in a cave. There was a raid conducted on them while he was visiting. He was arrested by the Gestapo, taken to Grenoble, and subsequently shot. If things had turned out differently, de Lubac could have met the same fate.
I should say, though, that de Lubac was very much an advocate of spiritual resistance. He repulsed attempts to draw him into connections with violent resistance. As a Christian, and as a priest, he saw his vocation very much as helping to lead the spiritual resistance to Nazism rather than shooting people or blowing up buildings. For him, it was the peaceful spiritual resistance that was the Christian calling.
4.
You have already mentioned how biblical exegesis is one of the central themes of de Lubac’s work. More specifically, he aims to retrieve the traditional focus on the spiritual, not just the literal, sense of Scripture. He begins this research with History and Spirit, his study on Origen’s understanding of Scripture, and then extends it in his multi-volume Mediaeval Exegesis. You have chosen instead his Scripture in the Tradition. Why this book and what is its main point?
Scripture in the Tradition is actually a compilation of texts from several of his works on scriptural exegesis, which are huge. Mediaeval Exegesis runs to four volumes. His Origen book is big too. So, if you really want a segway into his Scriptural exegesis, this a good one. It is a single volume, and it is not even too thick.
I have described earlier the fourfold sense of Scripture that de Lubac promotes, based on his immense research into mediaeval scriptural exegesis. These are the literal, allegorical, moral and eschatological senses.
What I could say a bit more about is how he sees the relationship between the Old and New Testaments, and how he sees Christ as bringing together the whole of Scripture.
For de Lubac, the Old and New Testaments are very much in harmony. We need allegory to make Christian sense of the Old Testament. Origen spends a lot of time allegorizing, finding symbolism in details in the Old Testament that might seem obscure and irrelevant. De Lubac thinks that this is important. It shows how the whole of the Old Testament points to Christ, even bits that seem lacking in relevance for the present day. Figures in the Old Testament point forward to Christ. Also, Israel, as God's elect body, is where the Christian Church originates. We see the Spirit at work in the Old Testament, going right back to creation, when the Spirit of God moves on the face of the waters. So, de Lubac sees God, even the Trinity, active in the Old Testament period as well as in the New Testament.
But clearly it is in the New Testament that Christian Revelation reaches its fullness. That is when Christ comes. For de Lubac, the whole of Scripture points ultimately to Christ and, using a term from the Vulgate, he talks about Christ as the verbum breviatum, the abbreviated word. This expression is from Isaiah (10:22-23) and is quoted by Paul in Romans (9:28). I might say, “Well, how can anyone possibly understand the whole of Scripture? There are all these books, some of them very big; all kinds of facts; all kinds of people; a tremendous amount of historical detail.” But de Lubac responds that Christ is the abbreviated word of Scripture. One of the things Christ does—and the New Testament presentation of him does—is say to us, “This where we need to look for the summation of Scripture. Christ sums up Scripture: in its history; in its doctrine; in its morals; and in its teaching about where the world is headed.”
Although we have these different senses of Scripture, ultimately it is a unity because it is brought together in Christ. We don't have moral teaching leading us in one direction and allegorical teaching leading us in another. No, they all are pulled together and unified in Christ. For people who are new to Christianity, showing them Jesus is probably going to be the best way of showing them something of the truth of Scripture.
Finally on this book, it might be worth coming back to the teaching of the Second Vatican Council. One of the important pieces of methodology there was to bring together Scripture and doctrine in in Christ. De Lubac contributes to the development of this methodology because he sees all Scripture as pointing to Christ. Doctrine is summed up in Christ too. It is not as if doctrine is concerned with tradition alone, and we just go to past Church documents for that. No, doctrine comes out of Scripture and is itself a revelation of Christ.
5.
There are a number of books on such an important figure as de Lubac. What makes Rudolf Voderholzer’s Meet Henri de Lubac stand out?
Bishop Voderholder’s book is a great one because it gives a good biographical and historical overview of de Lubac in Part One, and, in Part Two, identifies a series of topics in which his thought is important.
The first part is about ninety pages long. It tells a great story about de Lubac, starting from his childhood and going right through his life. Voderholzer covers important things. To what extent did de Lubac think that he was presenting a new theology? He has sometimes been viewed as the leader of the nouvelle théologie movement. De Lubac did not want this designation. He was critical of other attempts to create theology from scratch. As I have noted throughout this interview, for de Lubac, theology comes out of the tradition of the Church.
Voderholzer’s biographical section begins with de Lubac’s childhood and family and ends with his final years in Paris. It gives a great panorama of his life, rather than focusing on the controversy surrounding his doctrine shortly after the Second World War.
In the second part, he goes through in turn some key areas of de Lubac’s theology. Paradox is in here. This is something I have not spoken about. One of the things de Lubac is sometimes charged with is seeing too easy a step from the natural world to the supernatural in our understandings of God, knowledge of him, and our relationship with him. Rather, the point of de Lubac's doctrine of the human natural desire for God was that the desire for God is implanted in our nature but frustrated by sin and present imperfection. There is always a paradox in our relationship with God, which is questing for something that we can never fully grasp. Voderholzer brings that important point out at the beginning. He ends with the equally key point that for de Lubac, and for Christians more widely, what we are holding up is not a utopia, but hope for the future. The two great political ideologies with which de Lubac contended during his lifetime—fascism and communism—held up in their different ways a naïve, simplistic view of the future of humanity, based either on exclusion and destruction in the case of fascism, or, in the case of communism, on a naive optimism that material factors would just resolve and the world would come into a harmonious unity, without recognising humankind's spiritual needs and the importance of spiritual factors in guiding history in its faith.
You can read part two of this interview here.
