Henri de Lubac’s sincere emphasis on the accidental nature of holiness in A Brief Catechesis on Nature and Grace, parries the accusations of intrinsicism levied against him. “Grace,” he writes, “is supernatural in the fundamental sense that it is superior to any created or creatable nature, but it is in no sense a ‘supernature’. It is, so to speak, a new ‘accident’, ‘hidden in and penetrating the substance of the soul and rendering it, as a soul, capable of living God’s own life, his divine life’ (46). Mischaracterized as an superimposed nature Lubac clarifies, using the language of St. Thomas and Aristotle that grace does not imbue mankind with a new, divine, metaphysical nature, but instead is a quality, a divine trait so to speak, that spurs man’s natural longing to act in favor of the good, and to be receptive to the love of the Trinity. In this way Lubac counters both an extrinsic and intrinsic strain within his writings, as the person is not divine in nature intrinsically, nor is given a divine nature coercively, but is stamped with the Spirit of God, “‘who becomes the spirit of the soul’” (47). Quoting Origen, he notes that “‘in every creature, holiness is accidental’” (47).
Since grace is not a gift belonging to the human being by nature, but rather gratuitously given, the disproportionate relationship between the natural world and man’s supernatural end is maintained. Citing Cugno in the footnotes to the first chapter, we read “The ‘Kingdom of God’ is not a ‘world’. It is not to be classed with this world; its relationship with the latter is one of ‘radical heterogeneity’” (54). The nature in which man finds himself, and the telos to which man longs for, can only be brought to completion through supernatural action, through an act of God. The term “supernatural” as an adjective describing the transcendent order of being that God is, and the noun “nature” in which man finds himself, do not, Lubac reminds us, do justice to that to which they designate or signify. But “they remain useful because ‘they forewarn us against the temptation of ‘naturalizing’ the mystery’, in other words, ‘of undervaluing the divine Love which freely evoked another love’” (40-41).
In past blog posts I have quoted Hopkins’ poem “God’s Grandeur” which begins, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God…” Professor O’Malley used the same phrase to describe an potentially intrinsicist framework. Lubac would parse through this phrase with the scholastic distinctions between actual, sanctifying, and created grace. Actual grace is the grace given to us that enables us to will the good in a given situation, different from sanctifying grace, or the objective gift of God’s own being with mankind. Finally, there is a created grace, which, in quoting Louis Bouyer, is the prolongation of the Spirit in the soul itself, or the grace created within the soul. Emphatically, for Bouyer and Lubac, this created grace “is not a superior and distinct nature” (46). Therefore the world is charged with the grandeur of God in the sense that the world, as Fr. Bouyer mentions in his Cosmos, “will be entirely absorbed into God’s glory” (94), and actual grace gives us the capacity to see God’s glory within the natural order, an ability we would not have without this grace, but for which we have a capacity born of a lack within human nature.
Though de Lubac pushes against the extrinsicist mode, in doing so he does not inevitably fall into a trap of intrisicism. He states, explicitly, that Christ’s kenosis “makes himself partially immanent in his creatures” but this immanence is not something intrinsic, but given, and given objectively through the sacraments. The “partially” caveat, which Lubac uses again (85), denotes the care in which Lubac wants to describe the natural order. He elevates Maurice Blondel’s philosophy as attacking both the extrinsicist and intrinsicist schools of thought. Blondel, says Lubac, “overcame the opposition between an exctrinsicism which ruined Christian thought and an immanentism which ruined the objective mystery which nourishes this thought” (38).
In distinguishing modes of grace within the human soul, and categorizing the infusion of grace as an accident to human nature, Lubac counters any notion of an overly intrinsicist thought, while still maintaining the real communion between God and man through the sacred mysteries instituted by Christ and given to mankind freely through Christ’s Church.