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The Thomist 73 (2009): 593-619 THE ABIDING THEOLOGICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF HENRI DE LUBAC'S SURNATUREL GUY MANSINI, 0.S.B. Saint Meinrad Archabbey Saint Meinrad, Indiana THE MOST INFLUENTIAL EVENT in Catholic theology of the twentieth century was the appearance of Henri de Lubac's Surnaturel in 1946.1 This is not an especially novel or controversial claim. In this article I want to say why I think it true, and true precisely because of the centrality and fundamentality of the theological theses de Lubac put forward, and not merely in virtue of its historical location, its being "of this time, of that place," to steal a title from Lionel Trilling. But before that, which is indeed the burden of this essay, something should be said about some of the other ways in which a theologian can be-and de Lubac was-influential. Moreover, it will help to situate de Lubac if one considers him next to some other of the great figures of the past century. By "influential" here I mean "pivotal," an event that makes a watershed, that marks a before and an after. There are many great 1 Sumaturel: Etudes historiques, nouvelle edition, ed. Michel Sales, S. J. (Paris: Desclee de Brouwer, 1991). De Lubac was born in 1886 and died in 1991. For a good introduction to the context, content, and importance of Sumaturel, see the articles collected in Sumaturel: A Controversy at theHeart ofTwentieth-Century Thomistic Thought, ed. Serge-Thomas Bonino, O.P., trans. Robert Williams and revised by Matthew Levering (Ave Maria, Fla.: Sapientia Press, 2009). This is a translation of a volume published by the Revue Thomiste in 2001. Also highly to be recommended is Bernard Sesboiie, S.J., "Le Surnaturel chez Henri de Lubac: Un conflit autour d'une theologie," Recherches de science religieuse 80 (1992): 373-408. For de Lubac's own account of the circumstances of the production of Sumaturel, see chapter 2 of his At the Service of the Church: Henri de Lubac Reflects on the Circumstances That OccasionedHis Writings, trans. Anne Elizabeth Englund (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993). 593 594 GUY MANSINI, O.S.B. works of theology from the first half and middle of the twentieth century. But Charles Cardinal Journet's Church of the Word Incarnate (French 1941, 1951) or Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange's De revelatione (1945) do not mark a before and after. Something like Yves Congar's Chretiens desunis (1937) marks a before and after in Catholic ecumenical theology, but not in Catholic theology as a whole. The significance of Surnaturel does not belong to it in isolation, of course. Part of its influence owes to the cumulative impact of other works to which it is related both by historical assumptions and by systematic links. But Surnaturel is the keystone of the arch. De Lubac and his work, crowned by Surnaturel, turn out to be pivotal, I think, in three ways.2 First, there is his influence on both the form and the content of the publicly taught and institutionally sponsored theology of the Church. As to form, it is more historically minded. As to content, it is less focused on already defined dogma, it is almost anything except neo-Scholastic-and if not anti-philosophical, it is inclined to be at least a-philosophical, a-metaphysical.3 Combined with the more historical cast of things, this can induce a mild case of historicism, which de Lubac would by no means have countenanced. In a second way, there is de Lubac's influence on how the history of theology is read and understood, and what we understand its possibilities to be. Not only neo-Scholasticism since Leo XIII, but also the silver Scholasticism of the sixteenth and ensuing centuries have been largely consigned to oblivion because they are thought to be a distortion of St. Thomas and the larger tradition. Furthermore, if as Serge-Thomas Bonino says, de Lubac taught people better to appreciate St. Thomas's relation to the Fathers, he also flattened out the difference between St. Thomas 2 For a similar list, see Serge-Thomas Bonino, "Introduction," in Surnaturel: A Controversy, viii. 3 For the destructive effect of de Lubac...

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