It is a surprisingly difficult task to respond to a book which is clear, thorough, charitable, and with which one agrees. I admired Jordan Hillebert’s Henri de Lubac and the Drama of Human Existence when I read it in its earlier form as a doctoral dissertation the better part of a decade ago, and I admire it on re-reading it now. It seems to me a judicious and well-rounded piece of work, displaying de Lubac as a thinker, if not of “mere Christianity,” then perhaps of mere Catholicism—an erudite and passionate witness to the ancient and enduring Tradition of the faith. Responding in the usual academic vein, then, is an interesting challenge.

There are some points on which I might quibble, of course, both with Hillebert, and with de Lubac. Hillebert, I think, is not quite fair to the potency of the vision for which John Milbank so sweepingly claims de Lubac. Certainly, to conflate Milbank and Rahner as intrinsicists together (87f.)—while perhaps pointing to a rather blustering aspect of Theology and Social Theory 1—is to smooth over some deep and significant differences in their broader projects. But I am not a Milbankian, and perhaps that comparison—unlike the rather satisfying demolition of Milbank’s corruption narrative (82ff.)—is simply an unfortunate hostage to fortune. Milbank and his epigones are, in any case, well able to defend themselves.

On the other side, I could raise questions to some of Hillebert’s responses to the more neo-scholastic thinkers whom he engages in his introduction. And one could press on to the deeper points: does the longing born of lack, the frustration of which constitutes damnation,2 really leave the gift of elevation in Christ gratuitous? Is it really anything but injustice not to grant grace to a nature not created thus? Is this really not, then, in a certain sense, a created claim? But this debate too is well worn. Any worthwhile contribution from me here must wait for a book of my own—perhaps even one with its own Syndicate page!

Instead of contesting the ground on either side, then, let me respond by asking some questions of motivation and significance. What is at stake in these debates? Specifically, what does Hillebert think that the triumph of de Lubac’s position (including over the post-conciliar positions which he outlines in the book’s conclusion) would mean for the Church? What can one articulate when one recognises with de Lubac the natural desire for God as a longing born of lack?

We can ask this question in at least two ways, one pastoral or evangelistic, the other more theoretical, but perhaps not less significant for that.

We begin with the practical, pastoral question. What does affirming a universal natural desire for God, a longing born of lack, allow us to say to any particular person? Let us grant that some people’s desires (perhaps our own), are ambiguous, contradictory, confused, disordered. Alternatively, we might note that some people are ravenously desirous of what, for practical or moral reasons, they simply cannot have. What is the use, for someone whose difficulties lie in their desiring, of the affirmation of the natural desire for God?

Is it perhaps a case of saying that the confusion of desire is somehow a mistake or a misidentification? “Ah, you think you desire whatever-it-may-be, but in fact your natural desire is for God!” And granting that this is a mistake, is it the sort of mistake which is corrected simply by being revealed? One assumes not. If, instead, the work of unwinding and relaxing the grip of desires requires patient and painstaking work, is there any significance to the idea that the re-learned, re-habituated desire is natural? To put it another way, is there a pastoral significance of invoking the natural which is distinct from invoking the spontaneous?

Perhaps we should think instead that, in cases like these, the doctrine of the natural desire is actually a help and comfort to the minister. It is because there is a longing for God somewhere in there, simply by nature, that the continued pastoral effort may eventually win out. But this has a danger too—is this not a substitution of a trust in nature (albeit given by and from God) for the necessity of trusting in grace? 

Consider another case, of someone who denies any desire for God, but is not thereby caught up in some great maelstrom of confusion. Their desire is satisfied by the life which they lead—they are content. Perhaps then the pastoral task would seem to be some sort of “convicting of lack,” and the message that “Whether you recognise this desire in yourself or not, you have it.” Again, I’m not sure that this is likely to be convincing. 

These are extremely flat sketches, but they do seem to me to raise a question. My doubt concerns whether there is any practical import in recognising a desire as natural if, in any concrete situation, whatever would be required to reveal it would be as much as would be required to elicit it. If there is a point to identifying the desire as natural, especially in countering the atheistic ideologies which de Lubac found so significant and threatening, it must be in the desire being universal and inescapable. Atheism then must always be a revolt against oneself. Even if this is true, though, there is a problem as long as the inescapability of this desire only appears in the theoretical rather than the practical order—if the desire can be affirmed as natural without being recognised as spontaneous. Thus is prised apart that unity of theology and life which, following Blondel, it is one of de Lubac’s concerns to maintain.3 Truth remains an absolute defence—if there is a desire of nature then it is well to confess it. Nevertheless, it would hardly please de Lubac to have pinned so much on a truth which is of interest only in the abstract theological order.

Of course, the unity of truth and life need not be found exclusively on the personal pastoral level. Perhaps instead the significance of this doctrine might be sought on the social rather than the individual level. If we understand the unfulfilled longing for God as a hermeneutical key to the social situation, then all of these questions reappear as questions of evangelism rather than of the pastorate, but it seems to me that their force is sharpened thereby rather than lessened. Is there some benefit to preaching to a society, except that which accrues to some particularly receptive individuals, that it has a God-shaped hole which it cannot see?

If the practical level presents something of a dead end, however, there may still be a theoretical significance to confessing a natural desire for God, and especially for Hillebert’s stress on de Lubac’s statements that this longing does not arise from the beginning or intimation of possession. This qualification, at least, renders the natural desire unfit to play a particular sort of leading role in Christian moral and social reflection, and perhaps thereby opens up the way to a more balanced and traditional picture.

Specifically, that the longing is born of lack means that it does not as such sanctify those temporal objects on which it comes to rest. Sanctify I mean here in an epistemological sense. A desire which was the inchoate beginning of possession would seem to be a sort of divine energy in us, a guide given to us to fit and direct us to that end. If, therefore, it were to lead us to God through various temporal desires, would that not be evidence—perhaps prima facie evidence, but perhaps, if one really denies a distinction of nature and grace, very strong evidence!—that those temporal objects are rightly to be sought, that they will indeed lead to God? Desire—natural desire—then, would be a sort of independent principle of Christian moral vision.

Things seem to me rather different on Hillebert’s picture. If the desire for God is not itself the beginnings of possession, then its role is much more ambivalent. Unless it has been informed to the point where it does explicitly reach out to our final end in God, there seems to be no reason to expect that it will inform our actions in such a way as to actually order and direct them towards that finality. The theology of desire thus requires some further supplement in order to be the engine of moral discernment.

There are various candidates for such a supplement. An account of nature more broadly considered, indeed, is one of them. Nevertheless, if we grant both that the energy and dynamism of nature lies in desire, and that this desire in its natural spontaneity is ambivalent and sometimes mercurial, then it would seem that, desire or no, we are in the position of requiring something beyond nature not just to complete nature, but to correct it. Grace reappears, on Hillebert’s rendering of de Lubac, not only as the better guide to somewhere we were already going, but as revealing to us a way to the destination which we could not properly follow even though we wanted to.

This, it seems to me, is the significance of Hillebert’s final chapter on de Lubac’s sharp and fiercely expressed criticisms of the programme of Edward Schillebeeckx articulated at and after the Second Vatican Council. It is likewise at the heart of that wonderful phrase which the great theologian of the Tradition delighted to draw from the Adversus haereses of St Irenaeus: omnem novitatem attulit, semetipsum afferens, qui fuerat anuntiatus: He, Jesus the Christ who had been promised, brought all newness in bringing himself.

We can go further. Since the natural desire is born of lack, nature may need not only to be surpassed but even to be, in some senses, contradicted to be led on into the way it desires. The gap between desire and fulfilment is the space, in the hermeneutics of human existence, for a converted humanism. It is the space, as de Lubac announces at the end of Catholicisme, that most human and humane of theological works, for the cross.4 And yet perhaps here desire comes back into its own—if God has led us to this cross in order to fulfil a nature to which he has given a desire which it is so helpless to fulfil, is it not now natural to trust that there must be something more on the other side? Perhaps in this sense the natural desire can be the “living link” of the orders of nature and of grace: that it can have faith that the God who leads to the cross must indeed be the Lord who raises the dead.

I wonder then—and I’m not at all sure that he’ll agree with me!—whether Hillebert’s achievement isn’t to identify that the drama of human existence is not first of all of the drama of the longing, but of the lack? De Lubac’s works wear a serene and kindly countenance—he is not some dour preacher of condemnation and contrition. And yet with the desire read as longing born of lack, does the question of what is natural really enter in before the need for a great turning away, as in that concluding meditation of Catholicisme? Does Hillebert’s work serve then to remind us that, for this sage of Lyons too, the concrete shape of this drama of human existence is the drama of repentance and restoration, the drama of metanoia, the drama, finally, of resurrection through the cross?

When friends and students inform me that they would like to write on the nature/grace controversies of the twentieth century, I try to discourage them. Tumultuous waters await anyone plunging into those debates. First, there are difficulties in interpretation. Did Thomas teach a doctrine of pure nature or a natural desire for God? Did Aristotle teach a proportionality between a nature and its end or was that Denys the Carthusian? Did de Lubac’s position on natural desire shift after Humani generis? Then theological, political, and moral difficulties arise. Does a natural desire for God require God to grace creatures? If so, is that a problem? Is there some form of creaturely being other than a graced one? Did the criticisms of pure nature abandon a natural moral theology that held with utter confidence what constitutes sexuality and gender, a confidence upheld by Catholic magisterial teaching that then became questioned post Vatican II? Debates over pure nature cannot be separated from contemporary questions of gender, sexuality, and reproduction. Matters of political theology follow. Does the radical de Lubac lead to Milbank’s left integralism and pure nature Vermeule’s right integralism? Did the doctrine of pure nature contribute to secularism? Couple the irresolvable conflicts that these issues generate with the massive number of works in multiple languages necessary to navigate these waters and wise scholars might think better than to jump into such controversies, especially early in their vocations. Fortunately, Jordan Hillebert ignored such counsel. He has enriched a conversation difficult to enrich.

Hillebert offers a careful, exegetically substantive engagement with de Lubac’s work. He understands why these debates matter and he offers something many scholars neglect. Too many focus on the terms “nature” and “ supernatural” and fail to attend to “desire.” Hillebert’s second chapter moves beyond that binary. It asks us to attend to what is meant by “the desire of nature.” Focusing on “desire” rather than nature/grace or extrinsic/intrinsic holds forth promise in advancing beyond intractable debates. I will raise a question as to how he conceives desire below, but my question is indebted to his analysis. 

Hillebert wades into these debates with a twofold purpose. First, he rejects Milbank’s interpretation that de Lubac softened his position because of the trauma he experienced by being silenced by his provincial and chastened by Pius XII’s Humani generis. Hillebert finds more continuity throughout de Lubac’s work, and that makes his theology of the natural desire for God less radical than Milbank suggests. Second, while acknowledging that de Lubac consistently opposed extrinsicism in theology, he should have been equally opposed, especially after developments in Vatican II, to intrinsicism. Here we are on to something significant, something that I find in Hillebert’s Anglican tradition—the problem is with the very terms intrinsic/extrinsic. Rather than walking away from these terms altogether, however, Hillebert sides with Thomas Joseph White, O.P, that a “good extrinsicism” is necessary for theology (202–5). 

Milbank represents the intrinsicist position that is at the heart of Hillebert’s critique. For Milbank, the natural desire for the supernatural is the “‘dynamic link’ between nature and grace.” The dynamic link is “at once entirely an aspect of the Creation and entirely also the work, in advance of itself, of grace which unites human creatures to the Creator” (16). A great deal hangs on what Milbank means by “in advance of itself.” Does it mean that grace arrives prior to the creature that desires God? As Hillebert notes on several occasions, what Milbank means by this is “hardly transparent” (191). In the above quote, Milbank distinguishes grace and creation. Elsewhere, he argues that there is no gratuity other than creation. 

If Hillebert had access to David Bentley Hart’s You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature, which was published after Hillebert’s work, he could have found an even more forthright example of what he calls “intrinsicist” theology. I think a comparison between Hart and Hillebert on nature and supernature helps clarify what is at stake in these perplexing debates. With his customary rhetorical flourish, Hart states, “‘Pure nature’ is an atrocity of reason. Even God could not create a rational will not oriented toward deifying union with himself, any more than he could create a square circle . . . . or a morally and intellectually competent supporter of Donald Trump” (Hart 2022, 31). Hart questions why those sympathetic to de Lubac still “feel constrained to defend him against the charge of having taught that human beings have a claim on God’s grace by virtue of their nature. This is unfortunate, given that de Lubac would have been right to teach precisely that” (Hart 2022, 127n15). My sense would be that Hillebert might agree with Hart that pure nature is an “atrocity of reason,” at least I hope he would, given that he critiques Steven A. Long and Lawrence Feingold for requiring grace as an elicited rather than an innate appetite and then reading that back into Thomas (22–24). Yet I don’t know because I remain uncertain what a “good extrinsicism” is. 

I understand and am sympathetic with Hillebert’s criticism of intrinsicism. I once had a Catholic campus minister immersed in Rahner tell me that in affirming her being she was affirming grace. She was a remarkable and inspiring person, but not perhaps a very good Rahnerian. That kind of immanentism evacuates Christianity of its content. While Hillebert is sympathetic with the critique of pure nature found in Charles Taylor, and its resemblance to the immanentism of buffered selves, he also finds the above “intrinsicism” as problematic as the ”extrinsicism” it sought to remedy. This would appear to side with Catholic critiques of the “excesses” of Vatican II that now need to be curtailed, but I’m unsure if that is Hillebert’s position. What is certain is that he identifies six “problematic theological implications” from intrinsicism. First, it colludes with the sufficiency of pure nature because an always already graced nature needs nothing beyond itself for its satisfaction. Second, it “mitigates the novelty of the Christ event and the church’s kerygma.” Third it “softens” sanctifying grace’s “radical ontological transfiguration.” Fourth, it “risks relativizing historical means by which grace is mediated.” Fifth, it loses God’s “personal register.” And finally, it avoids “the necessity of metanoia” (17–19). Are these implications warranted in Milbank and Hart’s work? A proper response would require a fuller understanding of what Milbank means that grace arrives “in advance of itself” to creation, but little in Milbank’s explicit discussions of Christology or ecclesiology suggest that he finds them irrelevant for the satisfaction of our natural desire for God. (My own criticisms of Milbank lie elsewhere, primarily in his political theology). Likewise, one would be hard-pressed to find any of these six implications in Hart. For him, “the event of Christ” is “the chiasmus at the center of creation, the very place where creation occurs as an eternal act of God” (Hart 2022, 109). Even Steven A. Long might appear to be on the side of the intrinsicists in that he also admits that a state of pure nature does not actually exist. Hillebert writes, “Like de Lubac, Long thus grants that from the moment of their creation human beings were called to a supernatural end (whereas for de Lubac this call is constitutive, for Long it is an effect of the original bestowal of sanctifying grace)” (235n38). Have we yet identified the significant differences among the radical de Lubacians, the chastened de Lubacians, and the anti-de Lubacians? I’m uncertain.

Navigating troubled waters must be done with care and more should not be expected than to avoid shipwreck. A strength of Hillebert’s book is its careful exegesis of de Lubac. Although he disagrees with Milbank’s thesis of a shift post Humani generis in de Lubac’s interpretation of Thomas on natural desire, he acknowledges that the story is complicated. The continuity he finds is the nature of desire in de Lubac. Natural desire for God is not a possession but “longing born entirely from lack” (91). The natural desire that we have is coupled with its “supernatural insufficiency.” Yet Hillebert acknowledges that de Lubac’s “transcendental affirmation of God,” in which every act of knowledge is always a tacit knowledge of God, fits uneasily with “supernatural insufficiency.” Was de Lubac inconsistent? His error, suggests Hillebert, is that in opposing extrinsicism, he left himself open to intrinsicism. It is at this point that he calls on White’s “good extrinsicism” to assist de Lubac. This leaves me puzzled. Extrinsic to what? Nature? But what kind of nature would this be to which grace is extrinsic in a good way? Is it an already graced nature, a nature suspended between immanence and transcendence, a pure nature that possesses an obedentia potentialis that is more than mere non-repugnance? 

While Hillebert’s attention to desire is promising, retaining the terms intrinsic/extrinsic and coupling them with nature/grace perpetuates the problems of these Catholic debates. I would suggest a way forward by pointing to a much-neglected nineteenth-century Anglican theologian, F. D. Maurice. In his Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy, Maurice challenged these very terms in Aquinas. The mid-twentieth century Anglican theologian and dean of King’s College Alec R. Vidler wrote in 1948 that after de Lubac’s work, “Maurice’s teaching may receive a more sympathetic and favourable hearing than it did in his own time” (Vidler 1948, 51). Maurice critiqued Thomas’s distinction, drawn from Aristotle, between intrinsic and extrinsic principles of action (Maurice 1886, 621–2). The difficulty arises, he wrote, when Thomas and Aristotle “draw a line between habits considered as in us and habits considered as put upon us, which is so sharp and deep that we lose all feeling of the relation between them” (Maurice 1886, 622). Maurice thought that this failed to do justice to our creation in the image of the Triune God and the correlative ecstatic agency it generated that troubled altogether the language of intrinsic/extrinsic. Maurice hoped that one day we might read Thomas better than this by reading him as a theologian who offered an ecstatic agency in which virtues called us out of ourselves rather than securing ourselves. Vidler saw that possibility in de Lubac, but as long as we are caught between distinguishing intrinsic, natural principles from extrinsic, supernatural ones and asking how we can put them together, we will fail to move beyond the deeply troubled waters of nature/grace that keep sucking us back into their spiral. Perhaps we could move forward by forgetting the terms intrinsic/extrinsic altogether and focus on natural desire for the supernatural that Hillebert initiated in his all-important second chapter.

Hillebert makes two different claims about desire. On the one hand, the desire of nature is born out of lack. This makes sense and is related to the virtue of hope. We hope for what we don’t yet fully possess. We do not yet see God as we shall. On the other hand, desire is born entirely out of lack. I don’t think that this makes sense. If the lack is complete, total, how would I even know I lack it? If there were no object of desire, however inchoate, there could be no desire. Desire is what breaks apart any supposed binary of intrinsic/extrinsic. Both accounts of desire sit uncomfortably together in Hillebert’s interpretation of de Lubac. I think the former is the one that makes sense of a natural desire for God. We find such a version in de Lubac’s use of Thomas for his transcendental affirmation of God. (In suggesting this, I think I am repeating and not refuting Hillebert.) Thomas writes:

The cognition that there is a God is naturally instilled in us in a certain general and indistinct way—viz., insofar as God is man’s beatitude. For man by nature desires beatitude, and what man desires by nature is such that it is known to him by nature. But this is not to know, without qualification, that there is a God—just as knowing that someone is approaching is not the same as knowing that Peter is approaching, even if it is Peter who is approaching. (ST I 2.1 ad 1, Hillebert, 124).

If beatitude were not at least inchoately known, it could not be desired. Desire moves us to reason practically about our end even when we do not yet grasp that end. The end is, of course, the same as our origin. 

The difficulty with intrinsic/extrinsic setting the terms of the debate is that it potentially (almost inevitably) spatializes the relation between God and creation so that the question becomes how we get what is extrinsic to us inside us. Such a spatialization misses thinking through the inherent perplexity of thinking the finite in relation to the infinite, the temporal in relation to the eternal. No space exists outside God by which the question of the relationship between an extrinsic grace and an intrinsic nature could be asked. This is what I take to be Maurice’s point. Von Balthasar understood it, perhaps from Bulgakov, when he “placed” creation in the second hypostasis of the Triune life. If we began thinking there, would we find calmer water?

Works Cited:

Hart, David Bentley. You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2022.

Maurice, F. D. Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy, Vol 1. Ancient Philosophy and the First to the Thirteenth Centuries. London: MacMillan and Co, 1886.

Vidler, Alec R. The Theology of F. D. Maurice. London: SCM Press LTD, 1948.

In these brief remarks, I will engage two points where Hillebert queries whether de Lubac, in refuting extrinsicism, falls into the opposite error of intrinsicism, namely in his treatments of the relationship between Christ and the church and of the salvation of non-Christians. 

A title of a subsection points to a potential problem: “The Church as the Continuation of Christ” (158). Were the church organically to be an ontological continuation of Christ, this would indeed constitute intrinsicism. However, the section title is both misleading and in tension with what follows, namely a discussion of the sacramentality of the church. De Lubac himself is part of the problem for the subsection takes its clue from the citation on the following page, “the Church is for us the sacrament of Christ; she represents him, in the full and ancient meaning of the term; she really makes him present. She not only carries on his work, but she is his very continuation” (159). In this one sentence we have no less than four relationships with Christ and the church: church as sacrament of Christ, church as representation of Christ, church as continuing the work of Christ, and church as a continuation of Christ. Three of the four admit of a distinction between Christ and the church, but the fourth does not. Were the church to be a continuation of Christ we would be in danger of ecclesial monophysitism. De Lubac specifically rejects this where he says, “We do not adore her [the church]. We do not believe in the Church in the same sense in which we believe in God. . . . All the more then do we reject Monophysitism in ecclesiology just as we do in Christology, but none the less strongly do we believe that dissociation of the divine and the human in in either case fatal.”1 A number of distinctions would avoid too close an identification between Christ and the church.

One must distinguish the church as continuing the works of Christ in the world from the church being Christ, continuing his personal presence. Hillebert rightly affirms the first where he says, “According to de Lubac, the church is both the continuation of the unifying work of Jesus Christ and the anticipation of the completion of that work in the eschaton (p. 159). Yet, de Lubac himself goes beyond this, saying that the church “not only carries on his [Christ’s] work, but is his very continuation.”2 Here he distinguishes between the exterior organization of the church and the church considered as the body of Christ. Hillebert rightly draws attention to additional places where de Lubac appears to conflate Christ and the church such as where he speaks of a “communication of idioms” so much so that “the two names ‘Church’ and ‘Christ’ would seem to be interchangeable” (p. 162).3 He shows where de Lubac mitigates this conflation first, by emphasizing that the relationship between the body and head of the mystical body of Christ is one of subordination, second, by asserting that the church is and remains a sinner in each of her members until the eschaton, and third by recalling de Lubac’s analogy of the relationship between Christ and the church as one between the sun and the moon, which receives its brilliance from the sun of Christ.

De Lubac is aware of the difficulties even though in The Church: Paradox and Mystery (1967) he continues the theme of the church as the body of Christ and a continuation of the incarnation, saying, “She [the Church] is for us. . . ‘Jesus Christ diffused and communicated.’ She is ‘the incarnation continued.’”4 However, even though de Lubac continues the theme from his earlier works, he attenuates them. His awareness of the difficulties is evident in his statement, “The image of the Church as a body is ambivalent, making, as it does, a single organism of Jesus Christ and his Church, but signifying at the same time the subjection of the members to the head.”5 Despite the lack of clarity, this points to a development in de Lubac’s thought from Catholicism to the The Church: Paradox and Mystery.

Yet another mitigation that Hillebert could have developed further is de Lubac’s very notion of the church as sacrament. In the case of the church, the visible sign of the sacrament that is the church includes the institutional and social aspects of the church, that is, all that is manifest in history and located in space and time. The referent of the sign is the resurrected Christ. As with the incarnation, the human being the manifestation and revelation of the divine. 

Even though the concept of the church as the sacrament of Christ is closely related to the image of the church as the mystical body of Christ, it escapes a major weakness of this image by avoiding too close an identification between Christ and the church. The concept of sacrament is able to express the unity between the sign and the referent of that sign at the same time that it maintains the distinction between them, because what is signified is not absolutely identical with the sign that makes it present from a perspective of the modalities of the two, the one being under the modality of a symbol that within which the other is made present. This unity amidst distinction is analogous to the relationship between the divine and human natures in Christ. The Second Vatican Council would later expand on this relationship in Lumen gentium 8. 

The idea of the church as a prolongation of the incarnation is an ecclesiological theme inherited from romanticism. J. A. Möhler in Symbolism writes:

Thus the visible Church, from the point of view here taken, is the Son of God himself, everlastingly manifesting Himself among men in a human form, perpetually renovated, and eternally young—the permanent incarnation of the same, as in as in Holy Writ, even the faithful are called ‘the body of Christ’. . . He it is who, concealed under earthly and human forms, works in the Church, and this is wherefore she has a divine and a human part in an undivided mode, so that the divine cannot be separated from the human, nor the human from the divine. Hence these two parts change their predicates.6

The church is also described by Emile Mersch as a continuation of the incarnation in his well-known The Theology of the Mystical Body.7 Elsewhere in this work Mersch refers to the union between Christ and the faithful as a “physical union.”8 These earlier treatments of the relationship between the church and Christ were not in the context of the discussion of the relationship between nature and grace.

Catholicism was published in 1947 (5th edition, revised and augmented) as the second volume of the collection Unam Sanctam, although themes appeared as early as the 1930s.9 Thus, de Lubac was an early adopter of the category of sacramentality as applied to the church when compared to others picking up on the theme before and immediately following the Second Vatican Council.10 Perhaps what we are seeing in the ambiguity of de Lubac’s apparent vacillation between continuity language which seems to collapse the distinction between Christ and the church, and sacramental language, which maintains the distinction between the sign and the referent, is theology caught in the process of development. Clearly, his various comments show his intention to maintain a distinction. A charge of intrinsicism, then, needs to be assessed in its historical context and weighed within the totality of a theologian’s work.

Hillebert also queries whether there is intrinsicism in de Lubac’s “treatment of the common election of humanity in union with the mystical body of Christ” (165). He bases this on de Lubac’s affirmation of the possibility that all will be included in the eschatological reconstitution of humanity,11 his insistence on the mystical unity that human being share by virtue of their common nature and the assumption of that nature by Jesus Christ, and that they are an integral part of that humanity which is to be saved.12 Hillebert asks, “if human beings are always already united to the saving work of Christ and the grace of the church by virtue of their common humanity, is human existence not always already under the condition of grace (165)?” The question here is, “what does it meant to be under ‘the condition of grace?’” Does this include both actually graced and oriented to grace or one and not the other? Hillebert notes that for de Lubac “the common restoration of humanity in Christ does not mean that human beings are always and everywhere in the “state of grace” based upon a citation from The Church: Paradox and Mystery that distinguishes the organic link with Christ from the mystical body of Christ (p. 166). The difference between the two remains unspecified.

This same ambiguity is repeated later by John Paul II in Redemptoris missio where he speaks of the salvation of non-Christians:

Universality of salvation does not mean that it is given only to those who believe explicitly in Christ and join the Church. If salvation is meant for all, it must be offered concretely to all…The salvation of Christ is available to them through a grace which, though relating them mysteriously with the Church, does not bring them into it formally but enlightens them in a way adapted to their state of spirit and life situation (n. 10)

Here we have the same distinction as in de Lubac between a relationship with the church and membership in the church. Much more than this vague distinction saves de Lubac’s position from intrinsicism. While space does not permit their full development, the following points indicate necessary considerations.

The various covenants that God made with his people, both before and after the covenant in Jesus’ death, are all God’s interventions in the natural order for a supernatural end.13 The cosmic covenant was already oriented to its ultimate consummation from its very beginnings. Since the supernatural has no need of redemption or adoption in Christ, the very possibility of redemption is an argument that nature and grace are distinct. Nevertheless, this does not preclude that foreordaining grace is present in creation from the first instant of its emergence ex nihilo by the ordaining will of God. 

Foreordaining grace is not determinative of sanctifying grace. This presents an absolute intrinsicism. Salvation is not possible apart from faith or the freedom of an individual, but the tradition has been consistent in affirming that this may be an implicit faith manifested in commitment to God or moral conscience. In the absence of explicit faith, all people of good will “search for God with a sincere heart and, under the influence of grace try to put into effect the will of God as known to them through the dictate of conscience” (LG 16).

The human race should be considered as a unity before it is considered as a collection of individuals. Henri de Lubac writes on the first page of Catholicism, “. . . the unity of the Mystical Body of Christ, a supernatural unity, supposes a previous natural unity, the unity of the human race. While each person is potentially and actually saved personally and individually, we are also saved potentially and actually as a people (LG 9). This unity is typologically present in Christ the New Adam, who recapitulates humanity in his incarnation to achieve final reconciliation with the Father. The Holy Spirit inspires all people of good will to live according to right conscience and thus implicitly as well as explicitly to believe in God’s existence and his salvific design and loving will. The Spirit, who is the Spirit of the Son, never works apart from the Son. Thus, the salvation of non-Christians is not achieved in the Spirit alone in a manner unrelated to the Son.

Since the church is “a sacrament or instrumental sign of intimate union with God and of the unity of all humanity” (LG 1), Christians individually and the church as a whole have an obligation and mission to be visible signs of that communion and to bring that unity to greater fullness and actuality, to make implicit faith explicit, to articulate the Trinitarian form of salvation, and to be that community of salvation. As sign of eschatological unity and reconciliation, the church witnesses to the ultimate destiny of all humankind. As the mystical body of Christ and sacrament, it embodies that which it signs. 

No human being escapes the universal salvific will of God or lives outside God’s providential will and intervention in history for God’s salvific purpose, although God gives all the freedom to reject his divine love. Unity is not something achieved through human efforts, but is given in creation and redemption. The dynamic of grace, however, is dialogical. In response to the invitation, all people must respond in implicit or explicit faith for salvation to be effected. De Lubac’s position on the unity of the human race and its potential salvation in Christ is consistent with church teaching and the tradition. 

Jordan Hillebert has produced an elegant engagement with the broad range of Henri de Lubac’s writings. Henri de Lubac became one of the most influential Catholic theologians of the twentieth century and his work had an impact on several important documents produced at the Second Vatican Council (1962–65). As a result, his theology is often read in relation to the Council and to the development of postconciliar theology. Hillebert’s Henri de Lubac and the Drama of Human Existence is a descriptive project that, using an anthropological lens of the “dialectic of human existence,” uncovers the patterns across de Lubac’s engagement with theological themes of the supernatural, mysticism, epistemology, and ecclesiology. De Lubac was a synthetic—rather than systematic—thinker. It might be more accurate to say that de Lubac valued paradox more than synthesis. He explained, “paradox is the search or wait for synthesis. It is the provisional expression of a view which remains incomplete, but whose orientation is ever toward fulness.…The synthesis of the world has not been made.”1 And by examining de Lubac’s diverse writings through this lens, Hillebert is attentive to this theological style.

Paradox also describes the situation of the human being, created by God for a fulness beyond imagination. In Surnaturel (1946), Henri de Lubac advanced the paradoxical position that the created spirit has only a supernatural end, and thus has a natural desire for the vision of God, yet, at the same time, God’s creation of a being destined for the supernatural does not limit God’s freedom. For de Lubac, at times Christian theology, attempting to hold onto the truth, becomes unbalanced and fails to uphold another. Neo-scholasticism, in seeking to preserve the freedom of God and the gratuity of grace, neglected to maintain the truth of the human desire for the supernatural. 

Following the publication of his Surnaturel, de Lubac was accused by neo-scholastic interlocutors of undermining the difference between the supernatural and the natural, and failing to maintain the gratuity of the grace that elevates humanity to its supernatural end. If God has endowed a natural being with a supernatural finality, is not God then required give the grace to ascend to that end?2 Today, some theologians see de Lubac as a representative—not only of an inadequate theological resolution—but of a secularizing tendency within Catholic theology following Vatican II. At the same time, there are those who, drawing from de Lubac, insist that human nature, if it has a supernatural destiny, is, by its very constitution, graced. Hillebert writes, “it has been commonplace to locate de Lubac’s truly revolutionary insight in his supposed affirmation that nature itself is always already graced” (15). Specifically, Hillebert finds this claim in numerous anglophone interpreters of de Lubac. Ultimately, Hillebert rejects both the positions of de Lubac’s neo-scholastic critics and these adherents. 

Generosity and a spirit of dialogue pervade Hillebert’s writing. He takes seriously the theological commitments and concerns of his present-day Thomist interlocutors. He also seriously considers the engagements by some supporters of the Lubacian position that, Hillebert finds, ultimately misinterpret de Lubac. Hillebert’s dialogue in search of truth is a virtue that should be imitated. 

On Extrinsicism and Intrinsicism

Hillebert describes one of the key goals of the book: to show how de Lubac sought to weave a path between the extrinsicist position championed by the adherents of pure nature and an intrinsicist position that fails to account for the absolute gratuity of grace. He “provisionally describe[s] the extrinsicist position as a defense of the gratuity of the supernatural by means of a purely immanent account of human finality and the intrisicist position as a defense of the intrinsic relation between nature and the supernatural by way of an account of human existence as always already suffused with grace.” (59) Henri de Lubac’s engagement on the theology of the supernatural across many decades and many books makes clear his opposition to what Hillebert describes as the extrinsicist account of the relationship between nature and the supernatural, which insists that human nature has a natural finality that it can in theory achieve through its own powers. 

What is also clear in de Lubac’s writings—and fairly consistent throughout them—is that he also rejected what Hillebert calls “intrinsicism.” But this latter point, as Hillebert argues, was forgotten by recent interpreters of de Lubac who say that the basic claim of Surnaturel is that “nature always intrinsically, if only inchoately, participates in the supernatural that fulfils it” (16). Human nature, graced in its very constitution, is perfected through a development intrinsic to it dynamism rather than through that which is exterior and other (3). This has become the “majority reading” (13) of de Lubac in anglophone literature. Curiously, this intrinsicist reading of de Lubac appears to be particular to anglophone theological interpretation while not influential within contemporary Spanish, French, or German literature on de Lubac.3 

According to Hillebert, not only did de Lubac avoid the pitfalls of intrinsicism (202), but he opposed the intrinsicism found in trends in postconciliar theology: 

where de Lubac does offer substantive commentary on postconciliar theology, it is clear that his misgivings are every bit as indebted to a particular construal of the relationship between nature and the supernatural as his refusal of pure nature. That is to say, de Lubac was convinced that both neo-Scholasticism and certain trends in postconciliar Catholicism mitigate the necessity of the supernatural. The former, in its avowal of a purely natural teleology, relegated the supernatural to an arbitrary “superstructure.” The latter hadendencyy to “naturalize” the supernatural, eliding the necessary distinction between nature and the economy of grace. (206).

Hillebert sees Karl Rahner, Edward Schillebeeckx, and Gustavo Gutiérrez—or at least elements within their theology—as representatives of “postconciliar intrinsicism” (207).

Intrinsicism, Extrinsicism, and the Afterlife of the Modernist Crisis

Hillebert’s presentation of the “dialectic of human existence” is robust and convincing, and it helps to correlate de Lubac’s unwieldy body of writings. And, I believe, he rescues de Lubac’s theology of the supernatural from those who associate it with intrinsicism, both detractors and supporters. I want to dig deeper, however, into the origins of the problematic of extrinsicism and intrinsicism. 

Numerous authors have classified de Lubac and the Fourvière school as intrinsicist. Francesca Aran Murphy stated that Humani Generis “stigmatized” the “intrinsicism” in de Lubac’s Surnaturel.4 According to R.R. Reno, in The Ordinary Transformed (1995), Karl Rahner wove a path between neo-scholastic extrinsicism and the intrinsicism of la nouvelle theologie.5 In The Graced Horizon (1992) and The Dynamics of Grace (1993), Stephen Duffy argued that Karl Rahner distanced his theology of the supernatural from de Lubac’s “radical intrinsicism.”6 In Theology and Social Theory (1990), John Milbank introduced the contrast between extrinsicism and “integralism,” which for him is an account of the nature-grace relationship that refuses an autonomous social and political sphere. Milbank borrowed “integralism” from the French intégralisme (a synonym for intégrisme), the nationalist political philosophy associated with Action Française, which de Lubac opposed.7 For Milbank, integralist is positive epithet for those who escaped extrinsicism (de Lubac and Blondel), in contrast with those he says were still caught in nature-grace extrinsicism (Rahner, Liberation theologians). 

This problematic, however, can be traced to the mid-twentieth century. The majority opinion was that de Lubac’s Surnaturel indeed had been censured by Humani Generis (1950); and de Lubac’s position was labeled intrinsicist by those wishing to situate themselves between neo-scholasticism and the positions condemned by it. In 1953, J.P. Kenny, SJ, distinguished between “extrinsicalists” and “intrinsicalists.” He describes the “radical intrinsicalists” as those who “assert in man an unconditional, positive orientation to vision. And some—by no means all—have ventured further still. They have identified this orientation with nature’s dynamism. They have asserted that this orientation is part and parcel of human nature, that it is natural in the technical sense in which nature is contrasted with the supernatural.”8 Kenny distinguishes the good intrinsicalists, presumably Rahner, from the bad ones who he claims endanger the gratuity of grace, presumably de Lubac. Indeed, one of the key sources for this intrinsicist/extrinsicist classification was Karl Rahner. Rahner thought that de Lubac’s arguments on the genesis of modern secularism Surnaturel were correct, though incomplete: “Even if it is a little on the gloomy side, it certainly provides food for thought.”9 But he also suggested that la nouvelle théologie tended to “intrinsicize” the supernatural.10

The origins of this problematic, as far as I can see, are the so-called Modernists—Maurice Blondel, Lucien Laberthonnière, and George Tyrell—who in various ways denounced an “extrinsic” apologetics. For our purposes, the most important was Blondel. In History and Dogma, he coined what he described as “barbarous neologisms”: extrinsicism and historicism.11 From 1909 to 1910, writing under the pseudonym of “Testis,” Blondel published articles in Annales de philosophie chrétienne contrasting two incompatible and equally unsatisfactory alternatives on the supernatural: extrinsicism and intrinsicism. “Extrinsicist monophorism” is the notion that the natural and supernatural exist separately from one another and, therefore, that faith is an extrinsic imposition from the outside of the natural order. Blondel coined the neologism monophorism to describe the one (mono) form (-phore). Blondel believed that French Jesuit and neo-scholastic Pedro Descoqs supplied the theological architecture for the political theory of Charles Maurras and Action Française: authority is hierarchically arranged, imposed from a higher to lower order.12 As Anne Carpenter puts it, Action Française and its Catholic allies imagine “the world works through a chain of obedience.”13 For Blondel, intrinsicism was equally erroneous. He wrote, “Alongside [the] error that eliminates the supernatural, we find another that absolutely denatures it and which one could name an intrinsicist monophorism; because, while affirming the contribution of an internal supernatural gift, this doctrine, more specious and also more dangerous than the preceding, considers the objective revelation and external authority (when it still admits them) as mere social expression of internal afference.”14 

The extrinsicism/intrinsicism problematic is somewhat a moving target, but it has generally been used to refer to the wrong side of orthodoxy. Blondel sought to avoid the extremes of neo-scholastic extrinsicism and Modernist intrinsicism. After 1950, Rahner and others distanced themselves from the intrinsicist position apparently condemned by Humani Generis. John Milbank described intrinsicism (or integralism) as a good thing, the scaffolding for an authentically theological account of the social.

De Lubac and Rapprochement

Does de Lubac adopt a Blondelian description of extrinsicism and intrinsicism? In a few places he uses the language of Blondel, but he does not adopt it to position his theology of the supernatural in any sustained way. In his 1929 “Apologetics and Theology,” de Lubac, echoing Blondel’s History and Dogma, criticized extrinsicist apologetics, the deployment of philosophical and scientific arguments to coerce religious faith.15 But he also distanced his approach from a method beginning from “intrinsic evidence,” that is, a rationalism in which, apart from revelation, the human mind perceives and understands the transcendent truths of God.16 By proposing a Blondelian approach to apologetics, de Lubac had to distinguish his approach from that of the rationalists.

In The Mystery of the Supernatural (1965), he briefly contrasts a Suarezian understanding of human finality with the teaching of Thomas Aquinas. For the former, “finality was therefore considered as something fairly extrinsic: not a destiny inscribed in man’s very nature, directing him from within, and which he could not ontologically escape, but a mere destination given him from the outside when he was already in existence.”17 For Suarez, finality is separable from being. God could give or withdraw the human being’s supernatural end without impacting human nature. In opposition, Thomas holds that finality is inscribed in being. De Lubac wrote, “we know how firmly St. Thomas held that finality is something intrinsic, affecting the depths of the being.”18 This account of Thomas certainly concerns the theology of the supernatural. But de Lubac is certainly not implying that because finality is supernatural and intrinsic to being that human nature is “always already graced.”

De Lubac does not seem to employ extrinsicism and intrinsicism as a heuristic in a sustained or consistent way.19 Nevertheless, it captures de Lubac’s concern that some postconciliar theologians had lost the Christological center of “the world of grace.”20 And it contributes to understanding the reception of de Lubac’s theology and the controversy over the supernatural as it has developed from the twentieth century until now. Henri de Lubac and the Drama of Human Existence is exceedingly helpful in weaving a path through the positions represented by neo-Thomism, on the one hand, and tendencies to collapse nature and grace, on the other.

I am left with the questions as to whether the extrinsicist/intrinsicist problematic properly names the divisions that emerged after the Second Vatican Council, the tensions that emerged between the “conservative” and “progressive” wings of la nouvelle théologie, or, more importantly, whether it still names the theological (or cultural) divides within our church. As I understand it, Hillebert aims beyond an intervention in de Lubac studies—which he has marvelously achieved—but also at theological rapprochement that de Lubac’s theology of the supernatural might facilitate.

In concluding his excellent study of Henri de Lubac’s compelling yet elusive theology, Jordan Hillebert echoes the French Jesuit in noting the dangers attendant on theologies forged in polemics: in “combatting doctrinal error, the theologian often unwittingly adopts the vantage point of [their] opponent” (201). My main worry with Hillebert’s sterling book is whether he may have slipped into just this very trap. His stated aims for the book are: (1) to provide a critical exposition of de Lubac’s hermeneutics of human existence and its pervasiveness in his theology; and (2) to defend de Lubac against the increasingly prevalent intrinsicist interpretations of his theology. To do the latter he consistently gives us (3) a paradoxical reading of the Jesuit’s thought which is neither solely extrinsicist nor solely intrinsicist but a paradoxical confection which relates to elements of both. He succeeds laudably in all three, but the weight of the second aim is heavy and arguably affects the other two aims: seeing de Lubac’s thought primarily through the lens of the Surnaturel controversy forces us to see the “primeval forest” of de Lubac’s thought through categories which were actually only contingent or accidental in his theology, foisted upon him by external factors. And this is doubly the case: not only does Hillebert’s second aim foreground those controversial categories, but because he (rightly) wants to defend de Lubac against current and popular intrinsicist readings of de Lubac—which find their main source in John Milbank’s The Suspended Middle: Henri de Lubac and the Renewed Split in Modern Catholic Theology—it is the anglophone inflection of that debate which predominates. Hillebert is rescuing de Lubac from a particular anglophone view of the controversy. French scholarship on de Lubac does not have this lens.1 In foregrounding the categories of the Surnaturel controversy—categories which were imposed on him—are we being fair to de Lubac? Are we re-traumatising his theology? Should we not rather liberate his theology from the seemingly endlessly renewing tentacles of the Surnaturel controversy?

As de Lubac notes, those categories are a relatively late aberration in the theological tradition. The binomial of nature and supernature—deceptively symmetrical or oppositional—was begotten in ambiguous texts in Aquinas, and developed in sixteenth-century recondite theological speculations to do with the potentia Dei absoluta, limbo, and fifteenth-century ideas about so-called natural religion. For us today, the language of the supernatural evokes the potions and dragons of Game of Thrones rather than God’s grace which works through and perfects—but does not destroy or trump—the natural. And that is precisely the problem: the arena of the nature/supernature debates unwittingly conceives of the supernatural, and therefore God and God’s action, too much in terms of the natural: dragons and potions are physical things which do magical things. Conceiving of the supernatural in terms of the natural necessarily ends up trading in the mutual exclusions of zero-sum games: autonomous pure nature versus the complete gratuity of “superadded” supernature or God’s grace. 

The historical story is consummately told by Hillebert and does not need retelling here. In essence, extrinsicism and intrinsicism flow from ambiguous texts of Aquinas: one series of texts which suggests humanity has two ends or forms of happiness/beatitude; one mundane, according to its nature, and one supernatural, according to grace. Human nature, considered on its own, has its own goal and happiness which it can work towards through its nature. In that sense we can define and analyse it completely; we can think separately about its supernatural goal of eternal happiness which is added on top, so to speak, by grace. This yields the infamous “two-tier” theology of neo-scholasticism and its strictly deductive syllogisms. The other series of texts suggests that humanity has but one goal of eternal happiness. Humanity, as created and sustained by God, is always already in contact with grace and is ordered to the beatific vision from the get-go. Nature and grace are “intrinsic” to each other. The extrinsicists worry that the intrinsicist position undermines the gratuity of grace and its novelty. They also worry that without a non-theological account of human nature it hard to engage in social, political and legal debates in our pluralistic society: staunch extrinicists tend to hide particular theological decisions under the veil of “natural law” for political and social purposes (especially in the USA). The intrinsicists worry that the extrinsicist position, by insisting on “pure nature” (even if only hypothetically), does not take account of the call and presence of God within all creation by virtue of being created. Protology always already points to eschatology: we are all creatures all the way down. In essence these are two kinds of stories or narratives, with their own categories, worldviews and languages to describe the human situation. 

By contrast, de Lubac argues that as creatures, humans have a natural desire for the supernatural, but precisely as creatures, we are not able to attain that desire on our own, but need God’s help. That is the paradox for de Lubac: our natural desire, which is our very own, cannot be fulfilled by us (though of course we try to do so in many ingenious ways!) but can only ultimately be satisfied by the one who is not-natural, not-created: our ontological desire can only finally be quenched by the one who is outside the ontological (and noetic) system and thus grounds and sustains it all. The depth of our being is marked by a longing born of that lack: however inchoately we sense the call of the infinite in our finite existences. Hillebert brings out nicely how this way of seeing things is driven by a strong, even central, apologetic or pastoral concern in de Lubac: he wants his theology to meet the longings and desires of the people around him. Our being, our ontology, is marked by our origin and goal in God. Being and finality cannot be as firmly separated as the extrinisicists would have it, nor as strongly identified as the intrinsicists would like. In a sense de Lubac declares a pox on both, for both essentially provide immanentist visions which occlude or limit the transcendent freedom of the creator God manifested in Christ. In another sense de Lubac shows them both a warning sign: mind the gap! Both fail to allow space for the irruption of the paradoxical novelty of Christ. It is Christ who reveals us to ourselves, as de Lubac says, echoing Pierre de Bérulle and presaging Gaudium et Spes §22. 

One area where Hillebert’s analysis might be expanded in future is to do with the key de Lubacian term of paradox. Hillebert frequently describes de Lubac’s response to the Surnaturel controversies as a paradoxical one, and describes his theology as paradoxical, but I suspect he could do more to give a sense of what paradox is for de Lubac (not that that is entirely clear!) and why it is almost omnipresent in his theology. This would complement and add further detail to his useful exploration of another central de Lubacian term: mystery. De Lubac’s thought was wrought in paradox from his earliest unpublished student essays on Pascal where he sees the human, reality, truth, and Christ as paradoxical. He sees paradox as the union of contraries and distinguishes it from contradiction. He sees paradox as:

the reverse of what, properly perceived would be a synthesis. But the proper view always eludes us…Paradox is the search or wait for synthesis. It is the provisional expression of a view which remains incomplete, but whose orientation is ever towards fulness… the word specifies, above all, then, things themselves, not the way of saying them…[paradoxes] suppose an antinomy: one truth upsets us, another truth balances it. The second truth does not restrict the first, but only places it in the proper perspective…paradoxical truth is not limited to one plane.2

We can begin to see here how de Lubac actually wants to hold extrinsicism and intrinsicism together (here I differ slightly from Jordan): they are both onto something but are mistaken in viewing themselves as mutually exclusive. I suspect paradox might help Hillebert delve further into the “longing born of lack” in our very being and knowing, but also to go further in his analysis of de Lubac’s critique of the immanentist moves of (ironically!) both atheist humanisms and neo-scholastic theologies. Crucially, for de Lubac, paradox “is not limited to one plane”: nature and supernature cannot be in the same ontological ballpark. Putting them on the same plane leads to the problems and ultimate vacuity of immanentist approaches. Paradox helps us see that we need to be able to tell (at least) two kinds of stories about humanity: ones which are inner-worldly and trade in the kinds of hard differences and causalities of creation; but also ones which couch those differences within the radical difference between creatures and Creator. De Lubac was fascinated by different kinds of difference: he wrote about and frequently quoted the medieval adage diversi sed non adversi (different but not opposed).3 Not all difference is mutually exclusive. For de Lubac we need to be able to describe humanity with both stories which are analytical, synchronic and deductive, and stories which are synthetic, diachronic and inductive. I think that de Lubac is telling us, as theologians, we need to have a foot in both camps and realise the insufficiency of either story on its own. Maybe de Lubac’s paradoxical theology resonates in this way with the complex ontology and epistemology of Iain McGilchrist which tries to reunite left and right hemisphere outlooks on the world.4 It is this stereovision of paradox on two planes which makes me wonder whether Hillebert is right that for de Lubac it is the Trinity which is the ground of all his other paradoxes (196): I suspect that the real fount of paradox for de Lubac is Christology for it is Christ who brings together, more clearly than the Trinity, both immanence and transcendence. It is also de Lubac’s fascination with different differences which leads me to disagree with Jordan at only one other point, where he says that de Lubac “discerns an impressive uniformity” (64, my emphasis) in the tradition on the matter of pure nature. I doubt de Lubac would put it quite like that, as he was always at pains to emphasise how the church (and its traditions) are circumdata varietate, encircled in diversity, echoing Psalm 44 and Thomas Aquinas.

Christology is another area where Hillebert’s crystal clear analysis might be supplemented in the future. He underlines how de Lubac never tires of quoting Irenaeus to the effect that “Christ in bringing himself, brought every newness” (Adversus Haereses IV.34.1) and as we have already seen, in insisting that Christ reveals us to ourselves: it is only in the light of Christ that, for de Lubac, we can perceive ourselves aright. But is there more to be said about de Lubac’s Christology? What metaphysical shape does it take? It is actually quite hard to say, beyond that it is definitely Chalcedonian and conciliar. For my money, I think that anhypostatic/enhypostatic Christology fits his theology quite well and in fact may go some way to explaining his paradoxical stance towards extrinsicism and intrinsicism. According to this view Christ’s humanity is enhypostatised/personalised in the Word/Son, and we progressively come to be in that relation as we are filiated in Christ through the Spirit. This does not imply that Christ’s humanity (and our humanity analogously) is deficient or lacking in something, but is rather open to more than it is. Pure nature is not wrong as long as it is open to more: the error for de Lubac lies in the impression it gives of total explanation and being a closed system.

More specifically, I’d like to know more about how Hillebert understands “mortification.” In most of the chapters of the book, he concludes his pellucid accounts of de Lubac’s analyses of atheist humanisms, being, knowledge, and history with the argument that the immanentizing, inner-wordly views he (de Lubac) opposes, need Christic “mortification” (e.g., 198). But what is this mortification? And can it really be separated from transfiguration/resurrection? Is it the death (and opening up) of all inner-worldly systems we think up to make sense of the world? Is it the purgative work of the via negativa, endlessly at work in the “dialectic of God”? Or something else?

Hillebert’s exacting and stimulating monograph generates several questions of a kind born of curiosity which ideally I would like to discuss with him over several drinks. How does his analysis of this complex web of (largely) Roman Catholic theologies relate to the theology of his own Anglican communion? When Anglican thought features in this narrative it is in the form of Radical Orthodoxy’s intrinsicist over- and under-reading of de Lubac, which Hillebert analyses and criticises always very fairly. But why does Hillebert think de Lubac’s theology is of interest now outwith Catholicism? What is its ecumenical and inter-religious potential? De Lubac’s writings on non-Christian religions are not discussed here. 

Hillebert fascinatingly underlines how theology and apologetics are interwoven for de Lubac right from his inaugural lecture in Lyon in 1929: they should be symbiotic. That’s why de Lubac’s analyses of various atheisms were so important to him, as well as his work in countering anti-semitism and unmasking the neopaganism of the Nazi regime. But what does Hillebert think are the pressures on theologians today (and indeed tomorrow)? What characterises the recipients of apologetically inflected theology today? Balthasar famously talked of the anima technica vacua in the Epilogue to his theology. In a sense we are even more technological now than he might have conceived possible, welded as we are to our smartphones, seeing reality through the lenses of Instagram, and reading about it on Twitter. But I suspect today’s seeker is increasingly more concerned by environmental matters than either de Lubac or Balthasar foresaw. Indeed, this prompts the thought that de Lubac’s theology is strikingly anthropocentric: does Hillebert think it has resources for our more environmental and cosmic age?

Finally, it is striking that there are so many de Lubacs. Recently we have had expositions of his thought which argue that: sacramental ontology is the key (Hans Boersma); or spiritual exegesis of Scripture (Bryan Hollon); or ecclesiology (Susan Wood); or mystical theology (Andrew Prevot)—soon we will have interpretations which argue that natural theology is central (Philip Moller SJ), or that soteriology is key (Eugene Schlesinger). I’d be curious to know why Jordan thinks so many presentations of this alluring theologian are possible. Perhaps it is just that de Lubac wrote on so many topics throughout his life that many paths are possible, but perhaps there is something more interesting going on.

There is much more food for thought in this pellucid exposition of the central contours of the theology of Henri de Lubac: Hillebert is to be heartily thanked and congratulated. I look forward to the conversation.