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The effort of the intelligence can aim only at better understanding reflexively the given of faith.[…] All minds, however, do not experience equally … - Henri de Lubac
" "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.
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About Henri de Lubac
Henri de Lubac (20 February 1896 – 4 September 1991) was a French Jesuit priest who became a Cardinal of the Catholic Church, and is considered to be one of the most influential theologians of the 20th century.
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Additional quotes by Henri de Lubac
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.
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.
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