Henri de Lubac: Pilgrim of Hope, Witness to Jesus Christ
By Fr. Robert P. Imbelli
I first read Henri de Lubac, SJ, as a college student in the late 1950s, when Vatican II was still but a twinkle in Angelo Roncalli’s eye. Among my first discoveries were The Drama of Atheist Humanism and The Splendor of the Church(though the original bore the more modest title Méditation sur l’église). Through my years of theological study in Rome and long years of teaching, Henri de Lubac has been a cherished theological mentor and companion. The illuminating classic, Catholicism, the sprightly Pascal-like Paradoxes, the several probing studies on his friend, Teilhard de Chardin, the late-career (still untranslated) La postérité spirituelle de Joachim de Flore have provided never-failing nourishment and challenge.
And stimulus to prayer. Few other theologians impel so spontaneously from theological reflection to prayerful meditation. Reading de Lubac unclogs the spirit. Perhaps because, as he suggests in his crucial article, “Mysticism and Mystery” (published in Theological Fragments), the whole spiritual-theological journey of his life was to probe the mystery of the faith and to seek to appropriate it in that intimate encounter with and affective knowledge of Christ to which every baptized Christian is called.
Henri de Lubac, as he himself willingly conceded, was not a “systematic” theologian. His many works were more like symphonic variations. But they always explored one central theme: the uniqueness and sheer originality of Jesus Christ. For the mystery that was central to Christian faith was not some indistinct “I know not what,” but the distinctive person of Jesus Christ and his paschal mystery. And the mysticism, which is the Christian’s birthright, is not some esoteric and nebulous flight to the unknown, but a radiant and joyful, if always cruciform, engagement with Jesus Christ. Christian mysticism is being personally conformed to the person of Christ and thus coming into possession of our true inheritance as sons and daughters of the Triune God of Love.
Thus, a pregnant phrase of the second century father of the Church, St. Irenaeus of Lyons, serves as the fecund leitmotif of all de Lubac’s varied writings. Omnem novitatem attulit, semetipsum afferens: Christ brought all newness in bringing himself. A recent book, Salvation in Henri de Lubac, by Eugene R. Schlesinger brings this theme of the absolute newness of Jesus Christ in de Lubac’s thought systematically and convincingly to the fore.
One salient exploration of this newness is de Lubac’s retrieving the patristic notion of the “tri-form body of Christ.” Christ’s mystery unfolds in three inseparable dimensions. There is the unique incarnation of God’s eternal word in the life of Jesus of Nazareth, culminating in his sacrificial death, his resurrection into new life, and his ascension into glory. This is the primary and generative referent of the term.
But inseparably, there is the living Christ’s Eucharistic body, the ongoing source of life to the Church, which is itself Christ’s ecclesial body. Thus, there is a life-giving reciprocity which de Lubac expresses in the formula: “the Church makes the Eucharist, and the Eucharist makes the Church.” Benedict XVI’s teaching in his Apostolic Exhortation, Sacramentum Caritatis, clearly draws upon de Lubac, and exegetes the meaning more fully, in a way completely faithful to de Lubac’s own conviction.
The Eucharist is Christ who gives himself to us and continually builds us up as his body. Hence, in the striking interplay between the Eucharist which builds up the Church, and the Church herself which “makes” the Eucharist, the primary causality is expressed in the first formula: the Church is able to celebrate and adore the mystery of Christ present in the Eucharist precisely because Christ first gave himself to her in the sacrifice of the Cross. The Church's ability to "make" the Eucharist is completely rooted in Christ's self-gift to her. Here we can see more clearly the meaning of Saint John's words: “he first loved us” (1 Jn 4:19). We too, at every celebration of the Eucharist, confess the primacy of Christ's gift. The causal influence of the Eucharist at the Church's origins definitively discloses both the chronological and ontological priority of the fact that it was Christ who loved us “first.” For all eternity he remains the one who loves us first. (#14)
Two consequences flow from this realization of the tri-form body of Christ. First, salvation itself, the new life which is the destiny of Christians, is our being incorporated into the body of Christ. This is the new supernatural reality which has been inaugurated through the paschal mystery of Jesus Christ. We become integrated into a network of relations that is constitutive of our new being in Christ. Second, the ecclesial body ever remains dependent upon its head. The concrete Church, both in its historical actualization and in its eternal realization, is no decapitated body, but its very existence is, at every moment, dependent upon the life which the ascended Christ pours out in the Spirit. And the primary means of participating in this life is the gift of the Eucharist.
Thus, the body of the risen-ascended Lord, his Eucharistic body, and his ecclesial body together constitute the new transformed creation that the Triune God is realizing in the world, indeed in the cosmos: “the recapitulation of all in Christ” (Eph 1:10)—verse of especial import for both Irenaeus and de Lubac.
The Second Vatican Council, in proclaiming that Jesus Christ is the unsurpassable fulfillment of God’s revelation to humankind (Dei Verbum) and the salvific light of the nations (Lumen Gentium), thereby echoes themes dear to de Lubac. Indeed, he was an ardent defender of its teaching in the face of what he discerned to be a falling away from this Christocentric concentration. And the Christological devolution, in de Lubac’s view, began even before the Council formally ended, only to gather momentum in the Council’s aftermath.
For this reason, he devoted much of the remaining energy of his last years to writing his massive two volume work, The Spiritual Posterity of Joachim of Fiore. Whatever the historical accuracy of his reading of the twelfth century Calabrian abbot’s prophecy of a third dispensation of the Holy Spirit, there is no doubt that de Lubac discerned the perils of a view of history that called into question the unique significance of Jesus Christ. Indeed, he saw in the postconciliar Church a marked tendency in some quarters to “liberate” the Spirit from a Christological “confinement.” Eugene Schlesinger expresses well de Lubac’s concern regarding these Joachimite initiatives. In de Lubac’s view they compromise “the Christian novelty—[maintaining that] Christ has not, in fact, brought all newness in bringing himself;” and thus they detach “the work of Christ and the Holy Spirit, such that the latter operates independently of the former” (p. 113).
For de Lubac, as for the great Tradition he sought to defend, it is only through Christ and his Cross that the consummation and transfiguration of the world and of history can be realized. We do not journey beyond Jesus Christ; we strive to catch up to him, by entering ever more deeply into his paschal mystery. In Christ Christians are being transformed from image to likeness: “being changed into his likeness from one degree of glory to another” (2 Cor 3:18).
Thus, in the Eucharist, we do not convert Christ to our measure but are converted to his. To put the issue with the aid of Latin: is Christ a novum, a new thing God has done, or is he the novissimus, God’s personal and final Word? Does eschatology, the teaching about final consummation, have a Christic shape? De Lubac would heartily concur with Irenaeus: Jesus Christ is the Novissimus, because he bears all newness in himself. We do not appropriate him, but, in his Spirit, are being appropriated more and more by him, being conformed to him as living members of his body.
Again, Schlesinger says it well. “In Christ all has been given, and in bringing himself, he has brought all newness. This is then an inexhaustible source of life. One can never advance beyond it, not because all discovery is at an end but because it is ever new and perpetually valid. The way forward for the Church, then, is not a pretended advance beyond its past but a continual return to its inmost and founding reality” (p. 118).
De Lubac’s influence on Vatican II is well-known, particularly his notion of the Church as sacrament of Christ, crucially reflected in Lumen Gentium. But I can think of no more fitting summary of the spiritual-theological vision of Henri de Lubac than the following quote from Vatican II. Significantly it appears not in the “Dogmatic Constitution on the Church” (Lumen Gentium), but in the “Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World” (Gaudium et Spes). Its positioning at the end of Part One, as a concluding summary, and as the overture to Part Two, “Some Problems of Special Urgency,” belies any facile separation of “dogmatic” and “pastoral” that too often takes place or is even promoted. In the “Pastoral Constitution” we find a vibrant dogmatic confession of the Church’s faith to which Henri de Lubac wholeheartedly subscribes.
The Council teaches:
[T]he Church has a single intention: that God's kingdom may come, and that the
salvation of the whole human race may come to pass. For every benefit which the
People of God during its earthly pilgrimage can offer to the human family stems from
the fact that the Church is “the universal sacrament of salvation” simultaneously
manifesting and exercising the mystery of God’s love.
For God’s Word, by whom all things were made, was Himself made flesh so that as perfect man He might save all men and sum up all things in Himself. The Lord is the goal of human history, the focal point of the longings of history and of civilization, the center of the human race, the joy of every heart and the answer to all its yearnings. He it is Whom the Father raised from the dead, lifted on high and stationed at His right hand, making Him judge of the living and the dead. Enlivened and united in His Spirit, we journey toward the consummation of human history, one which fully accords with the counsel of God's love: “To reestablish all things in Christ, both those in the heavens and those on the earth” (Eph 1:10). (#45)
The Church is now embarked upon a Jubilee Year of Faith, a time of grace and renewal. May I suggest as vademecum for our journey a rich book that de Lubac published in 1969: The Christian Faith: An Essay on the Structure of the Apostles’ Creed. It reflects his sure grasp of the objective content of the faith and the need for its personal reception by the believer. At the same time it is also alert to the faith’s contemporary misremembering and even rejection.
In the book, besides insisting on the Trinitarian structure of the Creed, professing belief in God the Father Almighty, and in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord, and in the Holy Spirit, de Lubac offers a challenging reflection on the importance of the Latin preposition used and the grammatical case it governs.
The Latin reads: Credo in Deum, in Jesus Christum, in Spiritum Sanctum. The preposition “in” is here followed by the accusative, not the ablative case. It conveys a sense of “motion,” of “journeying,” of “adventuring into” inexhaustible Mystery. Not merely a propositional belief in God, but a faith-filled surrender to him, with all our heart, and mind, and strength. At the same time, not an aimless wandering in the wilderness, but a journeying in the light of “the sacrificial Victim who dies no more, the Lamb, once slain, who lives forever” (Easter Preface).
Hence, the motto chosen to guide our journey in this Jubilee year is “peregrinantes in spem.” It has been translated as “Pilgrims of Hope.” But, perhaps, it is better rendered as “traveling as pilgrims into hope.” The hope that animates and motivates Christians bears a name: Jesus Christ “our hope of glory” (Col 1:27). And the hope towards which we journey in faith is no utopian future, but Jesus Christ himself, the way, the truth, and the life (see Jn 14:6). What we need now is renewed commitment to live through him, with him, and in him, in the communion of the Spirit, as we journey home to the Father.
Robert P. Imbelli, a priest of the Archdiocese of New York, is Associate Professor Emeritus of Theology at Boston College. A selection of his essays has been published as Christ Brings All Newness (Word on Fire Academic). A Festschrift in his honor, The Center Is Jesus Christ Himself, was edited by Andrew Meszaros (Catholic University of America Press).