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Three  De Lubac and Cajetan Il nous faudra bientôt le [Cajetan] defendre....... Gilson to De Lubac, June 21, 1965 Another wholesale attack on Cardinal Cajetan was mounted by Gilson’s eventual correspondent, Henri de Lubac, S.J., in his discussion of the notion of the supernatural. In 1992, Henru de Lubac published a second and augmented edition of his Mémoire sur l’occasion de mes écrits. Taken together with the publication of his exchange of letters with Gilson—or more accurately of Gilson’s letters to him, amply annotated and commented on by de Lubac—one interested in what has been going on in Catholic circles with respect to the status of philosophy and the praeambula fidei has resources whose value can scarcely be overestimated.1 The rueful tone of these documents, the recurrent lament of the aging de Lubac that he has fallen out of favor while a hostile band of postconciliar thinkers has gained prominence in the Society of Jesus and in the Church at large, should not obscure the fact that the elderly Jesuit had been created cardinal in 1983 by Pope John Paul II, a recognition at least as significant as his invitation decades earlier to serve as a peritus at Vatican II. Despite this sense in old age of new foes, what abides in the cardinal’s outlook is that his true enemy is the Thomistic tradition he ran afoul of in 1946 when he published Surnaturel. De Lubac’s self-image is of a theologian defending St. Thomas against the Thomists. Johnson called the Irish an honest race because they never spoke well of one another. The same might be said of students of Thomas, though that does not of course mean all of them are Irish. De Lubac tells us that even as 69 1. Lettres de M. Etienne Gilson addressées au P. Henri de Lubac, et commentées par celui-ci (Paris: Cerf, 1986). a young Scholastic on the Isle of Jersey he had been a maverick within his order, resisting the emphasis on Suarez and earning the epithet of Thomist, even neo-Thomist, from the authorities, making him “twice a heretic with respect to the ‘doctrines of the Society.’”2 But already he was a Thomist against Thomism, one who gave himself the assignment of determining whether “the teaching of Saint Thomas on this capital point [the supernatural] was indeed that offered by the Thomist school as established in the sixteenth century, codified in the seventeenth, and affirmed even more starkly in the twentieth.” This task, taken up when he was a student of theology, led eventually to the 1946 book.3 The publication of Surnaturel brought de Lubac under a cloud and he was effectively silenced, that is, no longer permitted to publish. At first he thought that this was due to enemies in Rome, chiefly Reginald GarrigouLagrange , O.P., always the villain of choice, but eventually de Lubac learned that it had been other Jesuits, not Dominicans, who had questioned the orthodoxy of his views. But those views, de Lubac and many others came to think, had prevailed at Vatican II, the sweetest vindication of all.4 His later elevation to the College of Cardinals was taken to confirm the vindication of his views. But that took place when the theological scene had already changed drastically. De Lubac found that he had survived into a time when, in the Church, in his own order, there were “many who were enthusiasts, opponents or simply docile, but all of them equally foolish, a para-Council for whom work, when it did not conform to the new program, was either neglected or falsified.”5 Whatever the vagaries of de Lubac’s reputation within the Jesuit Order, 2. Mémoire sur l’occasion de mes écrits, 2nd ed. Culture et Verité (Namur, 1992), 33, n. 8. 3. De Lubac’s charge that Thomas has been distorted by Thomists sometimes extends to Thomas himself. What the charge comes down to is that a key teaching of the faith has been obscured by the way in which the supernatural has been presented. “C’est qu’en effet je crois avoir montré specialement dans le deuxième partie, don’t la composition est assez rigoreuse, que depuisqu’elles avaient abandonné la synthèse traditionelle systematisée et déjà un peu compromise dans l’oeuvre de saint Thomas, les diverse écoles de la scolastique moderne ne pouvaient que s’epuiser dans les combats...

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