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  • The Suspended Middle: Henri de Lubac and the Debate Concerning the Supernatural by John Milbank
  • David Lyle Jeffrey
The Suspended Middle: Henri de Lubac and the Debate Concerning the Supernatural. By John Milbank. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005. 127pages. $20.00.

One mark of a great mind is that it will strike upon the fancy of diverse interpreters divergently; to observers of redactions or interpretations only, such a mind may well appear protean. Such is the mind and such the fate of Henri de Lubac, perhaps the greatest of several great Jesuit theologians of the twentieth century, and one of the most influential of ressourcement figures upon contemporary theologians. Yet de Lubac is considerably less protean than he appears in this study by John Milbank; indeed, it is fair to say that, in The Suspended Middle, de Lubac sounds more like Milbank than like himself. It is also fair to say that this slim book is less about de Lubac than about an evolving theological debate over the adequation of pluralism in which Milbank has his reasons for wishing to suborn de Lubac as an ally.

One of these reasons is Milbank’s critique of Hans Urs von Balthasar, who Milbank sees as having capitulated too much (certainly more than de Lubac) to Humani Generis (1950), and whose aesthetic theology Milbank sees as celebrating “the spectacle of a divine gnostic drama,” in contradistinction to “the serene eternity of the God-Man” he finds in de Lubac, Bérulle, and Bulgakov (14). In his The Theology of Karl Barth, von Balthasar draws the nouvelle [End Page 715] théologie movement closer to neo-orthodoxy, as Milbank sees it, in which Barth’s “Baroque contrast of nature with grace, and reason with revelation… had failed to reckon either with the analogia entis or the surnaturel as governing both philosophy and theology according to a logic rooted in a non-idolatrous understanding of the Creator-created divide” (65).

Here, we are at the heart of Milbank’s concern with the relationship of grace and nature. He wishes above all to show that von Balthasar misreads de Lubac, bending him unfaithfully in Barth’s direction, in which the separation of nature and grace is dramatic and far too distinct. Von Balthasar thus appears on the side of Barth and Bonaventure in a disputa del sacramento in which the opposing team, led here by de Lubac, includes Henri Bouillard and, of course, Thomas Aquinas. This staging gives Milbank’s map in its crudest essential; what he adds to it is intriguing sidebars (an argument that Aquinas is the more faithful Augustinian than Bonaventure is one of the most interesting of these).

The principal issue in this study arises in connection with varying interpretations of the Protestant theologian whose work lurks in the background, namely Karl Barth. According to Milbank, von Balthasar fuses “de Lubac’s account of the supernatural with Eric Przywara’s restoration of the analogia entis to refute both a liberal theology starting from a human foundation below, and a Barthian commencement with a revelation over against a nature at once utterly depraved and merely passively open to the divine.” These two refutations, Milbank argues, “imply a ‘suspended middle’ and a non-ontology” (31).

For Milbank, de Lubac’s theology of grace is revolutionary to the degree that his view of the presence of the Spirit in the cosmos, permeating it so to speak, means that the somewhat prophylactic view of nature as distinct from grace cannot readily be maintained. Grace is on the old view in some real sense ab extra; on this view, by contrast, “the creature as creature is not the recipient of a gift; it is itself this gift. The same consideration applies to a spiritual creature: as spirit he does not receive a gift; he is this gift of spirit” (43). This formulation is a conflation of the sort one finds in Martin Heidegger: it leads to an apotheosis of theological thought in which gedenken ist gedanken where either the reception of grace or the frank acknowledgment of nature is concerned. Here, it seems to me, Milbank’s reader should proceed with caution: when grace and nature...

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