Transformations in Biblical Literary Traditions: Incarnation, Narrative, and Ethics--Essays in Honor of David Lyle Jeffrey

Chapter 6: The Nouvelle Humanism of Henri de Lubac and G.K. Chesterton

   The Nouvelle Humanism of Henri de Lubac and G.K. Chesterton Ralph C. Wood Soon after I first met David Jeffrey in 1997,he told me a curious story about his various encounters with Jacques Maritain while he was working on his doctorate at Princeton. Then ensconced at the Institute for Advanced Study, Maritain would occasionally notice Jeffrey bearing copies of Henri de Lubac’s work in his arms, especially his magisterial four-volume Medieval Exegesis. Rather than commend David, the great Frenchman would frown and wag his finger in warning. Assuming as always that his interlocutors share his intellectual brilliance, Jeffrey did not bother to explain the strange disdain of one eminent French Catholic theologian for another. Why, I wondered, would Maritain look askance at the scholar who, surely more than any other, has helped recover our knowledge and appreciation of the unprecedented outpouring of biblical commentary that characterized the first millennium of the church’s existence? It has taken me a while to figure it out,and thus to learn why David Jeffrey inclined toward de Lubac more than Maritain. Their essential divide has to do, I believe, with their radically differing kinds of Christian humanism. Maritain subscribed to 159 what he himself identified as an integral humanism, while de Lubac’s humanism is decisively shaped by the movement he helped to found: la nouvelle théologie. This is hardly the occasion for giving a full-blown description of the respective theological projects of Maritain and de Lubac—both of them quite large and spanning a lifetime’s work. Instead, the matter may be best illumined by approaching it from the viewpoint of G.K. Chesterton ’s most famous book, Orthodoxy. This is a counterintuitive move, since Chesterton was a professed Thomist whose work would seem naturally to resonate with such distinguished neo-Thomists as Jacques Maritain and Etienne Gilson. Indeed, Gilson made the astonishing confession that after a lifetime of studying the Angelic Doctor, he could not have produced such a succinct and compelling synopsis of Aquinas’s teaching as is to be found in Chesterton’s splendid primer on Saint Thomas, The Dumb Ox. Chesterton turned it out in a bare six weeks, and with only glancing attention to the Summa itself. Yet I remain convinced that Chesterton’s work is more fully illuminated by linking it to de Lubac and the nouvelle theologians, for his humanism, like David Jeffrey’s, is not integralist but ecclesial. Chesterton and Jeffrey also share the conviction that the natural order is always and already graced rather than having its own quasi-independent purposes. I The primary maxims of Christian humanism were famously formulated in the fifth century by Saint Augustine of Hippo: “credo ut intelligam” (I believe so that I may understand) and in the eleventh century by Saint Anselm of Canterbury: “fides quaerens intellectum” (faith seeking understanding ).1 In both cases, Christian humanism holds that God has instilled in every person a natural desire for a happiness that can be completely satisfied by nothing else than the final, indeed the eternal and Beatific Vision of God.2 He has also implanted the natural law of conscience in every human being. Even though we have violated this inward law, thus becoming fallen no less than finite creatures, we remain capable of understanding ourselves and our cosmos deeply if not altogether truly and fully. Hence the ancient theological term: adaequatio intellectus ad rem, the conformity 160 Ralph C. Wood of the mind to reality. Rightly used, the mind discloses that we are not self-sufficient but dependent and broken beings. It also discerns that we can only partially repair our damaged lives and disordered world. Above all, the intellect can detect the need for what it cannot supply—namely, the divine grace that alone can heal ourselves and our world—imperfectly here and now, perfectly in the life to come. In the Christian humanist view, God provides us with the immense freedom to receive such an incomparable gift—or else, alas, to reject it with the entirety of our being.3 Our cooperative grace (i.e., human assent) is essential to the operative grace of God. The maker of heaven and earth is no bully, even if he remains the One whom Francis Thompson called the Hound of Heaven, pursuing his prey down all the alleys of our lives, even...