Henri de Lubac Quotes

Credulity, sectarianism, and sloth are three natural tendencies of man. Too often he canonizes them under nobler names.

[D]oes not the mutual love of two beings complete them both, and call forth in each of them higher and more irreducible qualities? That is, in proportion as this love tends the more to true unity, because it is more spiritualized, so are these qualities more fully, more strictly personal.

The effort of the intelligence can aim only at better understanding reflexively the given of faith.[…] All minds, however, do not experience equally the need for such an effort. It is nonetheless very often necessary for them, on the level where their natural speculation usually moves, for dogmas to be given a certain coherent view, more systematized than the teaching of the Church, which renders these dogmas more assimilable to them and which prevents ever-possible deviations. Whence the permanent usefulness of theories that are constructed, through the arrangement of concepts, within common sense, starting with uncriticized representations. Their intellectual value can be weak. To admit them is not, however, pure pragmatism, since they are useful, not for any end whatsoever, but for the maintenance of a truth.… [W]e call to mind one case of this kind by citing the theory of the scientia media: it remains a necessary support for those who need to conceive of the relations between grace and human freedom as an organized system and who could not otherwise preserve the idea of freedom.… [Footnote:] Let us observe, however, that such theories, while they serve to maintain a truth on which attention is fixed, generally thereby compromise a complementary truth, which it is sometimes no less important to hold. We know well enough the weak point in Molinism.

The human intelligence is made in such a way that, if it has the power to criticize its own representations [of divine matters], it does not have an equal power to replace them. It succeeds in detecting everything inadequate in them: it is precisely in this that its greatness shines. But it will never possess the adequate formula that would put an end to its search. That is why it can seem to the intelligence that through this work of criticism it is carrying out a negative work. At the very least, it seems, through a series of overly subtle steps, to be compromising the truth of which it had at first an assured, total perception, although the expression that was given of it was, as it well knew, only roughly approximate. With its s, in its imaginative conceptions, it at least enclosed a certain truth. It held it in tuto [securely]. Now is this very truth not going to be called into question? Such is the objection—or rather such is the instinctive fear—that any attempt at real reflection always awakens. The life of the spirit, like that of the body, is inevitably the source of "unease". The dead alone are in complete repose. The intelligence is thus in dread of itself. It fears generating its own bewilderment.

In the interests of refuting such chaotic concepts as those which see a divine Church only in a "Church of the saints", an entirely invisible society which is nothing but a pure abstraction, we must not fall into the contrary error. The Church "in so far as visible" is also an abstraction, and our faith should never make separate what God from the beginning has joined together: […] in ecclesiology just as […] in Christology, […] dissociation of the divine and the human […] is fatal. If necessary, the experience of Protestantism should serve us as sufficient warning. Having stripped it of all its mystical attributes, it acknowledged in the visible Church a mere secular institution; as a matter of course it abandoned it to the patronage of the state and sought a refuge for the spiritual life in an invisible Church, its concept of which had evaporated into an abstract ideal.

It becomes increasingly clear that […] the Christian's watchword can no longer be "escape" but "collaboration". He must co-operate with God and men in God's work in the world and among humanity.

Christianity, by those doctrinal aspects that we have just emphasized as well as by others, brought something absolutely new into the world. Its concept of salvation is not merely novel in comparison with that of those religions in existence at the time of its birth. It is a unique phenomenon in the religious history of mankind.<p>For what do we witness outside Christianity whenever a religious movement rises above the domain of sense and effectively transcends the limit of nationality? In every case, though appearances may differ considerably, the basis is the same—an individualist doctrine of escape. It was this that inspired ancient mysticism, whether it sought to escape the vicissitudes of the sub-lunary world or to pass over the outer circle of the cosmos and to penetrate into the realm of intelligible Essences or even beyond.

[S]ince being is analogical, we are quite correct in using the same words, in particular the word 'being', for both God and his creatures.

The moral value of the different systems varies very considerably. So does their spiritual depth; but in this connection the achievements of Greek thought, though it reached a very high level, cannot be compared with the heights of Indian thought. Sometimes understanding is imprisoned in myth, and sometimes it is turned inwards in pure reflexion—or what seems to be. Yet running all through these many differences there is always agreement about the basis of the problem and its presuppositions: the world from which escape must be sought is meaningless, and the humanity that must be outstripped is without a history.

The Church, trusting in the Holy Spirit that leads her, trusts also all the peoples that she comes to free. That is no sign of naïveté on her part. She […] knows […] that all men are one in community of their divine origin and destiny; and that suffices to give her confidence in face of all the theories engendered by pride and egoism.[…] Besides, does not the only efficacious way to bring out the hidden truth and to avoid extinguishing the good that would break forth lie in a systematic desire to study sympathetically those forms of thought that are most remote from us, and in this study to pay particular attention to privileged cases, however rare they may be? It is at its highest reaches that humanity must be understood; the plains—or the depressions—will always be explored soon enough.

In a non-transcendent society, the reduction of man to his "social relationships" will work inevitably to the prejudice of his personal interiority, and will beget a tyranny of some kind, however novel. Moreover, have we not already the right to think, short as is our experience of this sort of thing, that it provides our analysis with its first confirmation? When Marx's followers eventually become aware of this, they will have no longer any inclination to extol that "total revolution" that they suppose themselves to have achieved in human intelligence before implanting it in society. They will have no longer any inclination to sing of their deliverance from "metaphysical agony" and from the "obsession of God". They will have to return to "those accursed eternal questions", as Dostoievski called them.

Decadence, instability, disintegration, corruption, reversal of attitude, all that arises through the simple fact of one's going on existing without self-criticism, self-renewal, constant self-adaptation, without letting anything in one die, through the simple fact of gradually settling down in the vantage point one occupies, the good conscience one enjoys. Such is the permanent danger of all spiritual life. It is an inevitable deterioration which can only be overcome—and painfully at that—by a watchful mustering of strength—unless it be effortlessly vanquished by a wonderful gift of grace.…<p>Whence the necessity of paradox: or rather the perpetual flavor of paradox that truth has, when it is freshly expressed, for the man who clings to a truth when it is in the process of turning into a lie.

In the One there is no solitariness, but fruitfulness of life and warmth of presence.[…] In the all-sufficient Being there is no selfishness but the exchange of a perfect Gift. The created mind, though so faint a copy of him who is, is none the less a reproduction in some sort of his structure—ad imaginem fecit eum—and practiced eyes can discern the stamp of the creating Trinity. There is no solitary person: each one in his very being receives of all, of his very being must give back to all.[…] Thus it can also be said, to exalt its inner richness and to make clear its character as an end, which all others must acknowledge, that "a person is a whole world", but it must also be added at once that this "world" presupposes others with which it makes up one world only.

We must come to see that God is not so much the cause of moral obligation or the sanction of duty as the very substance of Good. Then what we call the moral proof brings us in one leap to the true God, revealing himself as God of Charity.

Remember, after all, that the Gospel is full of paradoxes, that man is himself a living paradox, and that according to the Fathers of the Church, the Incarnation is the supreme paradox.