Henri de Lubac Quotes

Protestantism, whether primitive or modern, Lutheran or Calvinist, orthodox or liberal, generally occurs as a religion of antitheses—and liberal theology is not the least marked by this characteristic. Either rites or morals, authority or liberty, faith or works, nature or grace, prayer or sacrifice, Bible or pope, Christ the Saviour or Christ the judge, sacraments or the religion of the spirit, mysticism or prophecy … but Catholicism does not accept these dichotomies and refuses to be merely Protestantism turned inside out.

The Holy Spirit that Christ promised to send […] creates in man new depths which harmonize him with the "depths of God" [Job 11:7].

We realize that the men of each generation could possess no more than the science of the time, that revelation makes no difference here: its light is of another order. Neither the biblical writers nor the Fathers nor the medieval theologians could have known, obviously, about Neanderthal man or Sinanthropus, nor could they have had precise knowledge about the Chinese. But the material narrowness of their view was no hindrance to its formal breadth. And it is this latter which is proper to Catholicism; however remote the horizons which modern science discovers, Catholicism spontaneously incorporates them. Discoveries in astronomy, at first so disturbing, have resulted in the freeing of Christian thought from the confines of an ancient cosmology, ill-suited to its genius; and what was at first taken to be a dogmatic crisis was only a wholesome surprise. Thus we can be assured that the fresh conclusions forced upon us by our history and our empirical origins will help us, after their own fashion, to probe more deeply into the meaning of our Catholicism, in its concern for the whole history of man and its solicitude for each member of the human family.

Modern philosophy acts particularly like a critic. In a manner that is more positivistic and scientistic in some, more rationalistic and idealistic in others, its overall action remains corrosive. […] This whole work of thought, whose greatness we must not fail to recognize, is paid for in practice by the loss of the living God. The world then becomes a world of abstractions, when it is not absurdly reduced to a world of phenomena. In losing its mysterious innermost depth, it has lost its soul. Man is isolated, uprooted, "disconcerted". […] The world itself appears "broken". There is, at the innermost part of consciousness, a metaphysical despair.[…] It is then that substitute faiths inevitably present themselves to fill this tragic void. Such is the fourth and final period of the process. Man is not satisfied by ideologies cut off from any source of real efficacy: the hour must come when he is disenchanted with them. He lives still less from criticism and negations. He does not live by and neutrality. Inevitably something like a great call for air is produced in his inner void, which opens him to the invasion of new positive forces, whatever they might be. The latter conquer him all the more quickly, the more coarse and virulent they are. Cut off from a higher life, he gives in to the brutal pressures that, at least, give him the feeling of a life. Having abused criticism to make truth itself vanish, he now dislikes using it[,] to protect his mirages. A troubled credulity succeeds his faith. Rationalism has expelled mystery: myth takes its place.

[T]hough not being absolutely the same as ours, the difficulties for a Saint Peter or a Saint Paul in believing were no less strong. Nor were those of their successors, the Origens and the Cyrils , the Ambroses and the Augustines. Modern man flatters himself when he judges that the Copernican revolution or the Kantian revolution dug out a new hiatus between his thought and the thought of the Ancients. It was as hard to believe then as it is today! It was hard, for a Jewish monotheist—"Listen, Israel! Your God is one!"—to believe in the divinity of a man. It was hard to believe in the crucifixion of the Son of God. It was hard for a reasonable man, who had been able to see up close the Son of Man in his humiliation, to believe in the resurrected Christ.

To seek sincerity above all things is perhaps, at bottom, not to want to be transformed; it is to cling to yourself, to have a morbid love of yourself, just as you are, that is to say, false. It is to refuse release.

For a spiritual and metaphysical crisis, only a remedy of the same nature is appropriate.

Everybody has his filter, which he takes about with him, though which, from the indefinite mass of facts, he gathers in those suited to confirm his prejudices. And the same fact again, passing through different filters, is revealed in different aspects, so as to confirm the most diverse opinions.<p>Rare, very rare are those who check their filter.