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

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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 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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[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.

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Christian tradition has always looked on heaven under the analogy of a city. Coelestis urbs Jerusalem.[…] It is a city compact like a single house; a close-knit society, gathered like one family under a singe roof […] but at the same time extended to the uttermost.[…] Among those who are received within this heavenly city there is a more intimate relationship than subsists among the members of a human society, for among them there is not only outward harmony, but true unity […], the very consummation of unity, both the image and the result of the unity of the Divine Persons among themselves.[…] The Christian mysticism of unity is trinitarian. The likeness, which in every created soul must be the completion of the divine Image, is not that of a Spinozist God; it is that of a God of Love, of the God whose being is Love.

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