Theology in History by Henri De Lubac (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 481 resume work on this task and carry it through to the end. (Translated by Sr. Mary Thomas Noble, O.P.) JEAN-PIERRE TORRELL;O.P. Albertinum Fribourg, Switzerland Theology in History. By HENRI DE LUBAC. Trans. ANNE ENGLUND NASH. San Franscisco: Ignatius Press, 1997. Pp. 625. $29.95 (paper). ISBN 0-89870-472-3. Perhaps more than any single book, Theology in History communicates the multifaceted intellectual personality of Henri de Lubac. This wide-ranging collection of thirty-six previously published and unpublished scholarly and occasional texts, from ninety-three pages to a single page in length, contains some of de Lubac's most significant essays, as well as some less weighty, but no less trenchant, writings. Ignatius Press, in a translation that is mostly fine, has published in a single volume with two parts what in French was two volumes-Theologie dans l'histoire: I. Lalumiere du Christ and II. Questions disputees et resistance au nazisme (Paris: Desclee de Brouwer, 1990). Michel Sales, S.J., has written an informative forward and has edited the text with brief historical notes. Theology in History reveals de Lubac's unified theological perspective on the substance of the Christan faith within diverse historical, cultural-linguistic contexts. Part 1, "The Light of Christ," begins with a section on "The Fathers and Christian Humanism." In an article on "The Dialogue on the Priesthood by Saint John Chrysostom" (1978), de Lubac affirms the ministerial synthesis, necessary for the communication of the "gift of God," between teaching, worship, and government in the Church; a break-up of this unity results for the Church in "legalism in government, the magistery of professors in doctrine, superstition in worship" (30). "Origenian Transposition" (1961) examines Origen's purification and assimilation of Platonism in Christian faith; this method of transposition, as opposed to dialectical rejection, has been operative throughout the history of Christian thought. "Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Pedro Garcia" (1977) situates Pico within authentic Catholicism, despite the judgment of "a handful of theologians," among them Bishop Garcia and "a whole battalion of historians" (40). De Lubac's preface to G. Chantraine's 'Mystere' et 'Philosophie du Christ' selon Erasmus (1971) presents Erasmus as, above all, a theologian who concentrated on the mysterium, philosophia Christi, and the bond between exegesis and theology. "On a Thought by 482 BOOK REVIEWS Pascal" (previously unpublished)-"The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me"-diagnoses Pascal's internal struggle with the new secular vision of the world as analogous to Christ's paradigmatic and redemptive kenosis. In a masterful opusculum, "The Dispute in Modern Times about the Salvation of Origen" (1982), de Lubac presents an exemplary and fascinating study on the fate of the apocryphal "fall" of Origen in the history of scholarship. De Lubac attributed great importance to his unfinished and heretofore unpublished "TripartiteAnthropology," the longest text in Theology in History. The tripartition of man appears in St. Paul-"your entire being, spirit, soul and body" (1Thess5:23)-as "a threefold zone of activity, from the periphery to the center, or, to use a traditional and irreplaceable word, to the 'heart"' (117). While a number of commentators reduce man to a bipartite anthropology of soul and body, the spirit (pneuma) "is the principle of a higher life, the place of communication with God" (125). In an analysis that runs from antiquity to the modern period, de Lubac shows that "across languages, theories and, as one never stops saying today, cultural contexts that differ greatly, to be sure, it is possible to discern a fundamental continuity" (154). Worthy of its own separate discussion, "Tripartite Anthropology" displays de Lubac's magisterial command of the Christian tradition as well as his hermeneutical approach of affirming continuity amidst cultural-linguistic change. In contradistinction to "the narrow anthropological dualism that triumphed in modern Scholasticism as well as in the university philosophy springing from Cartesianism" (173), the tripartite anthropology is "the constant basis" (176) of human transcendence and Christian spirituality. De Lubac's position on the natural desire for God is evident in this concern for a human and "mysterious zone where the impulse toward God is situated" (200). The epilogue to part 1, "The Light...