Natura Pura: On the Recovery of Nature in the Doctrine of Grace

Introduction

INTRODUCTION The existence of God and other like truths about God, which can be known by natural reason, are not articles of faith, but are preambles to the articles; for faith presupposes natural knowledge, even as grace presupposes nature, and perfection supposes something that can be perfected. Nevertheless, there is nothing to prevent a man, who cannot grasp a proof, accepting, as a matter of faith, something which in itself is capable of being scientifically known and demonstrated. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae The following chapters converge on one central point: the crucial need to return to the actual teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas with respect to the distinction within unity of nature and grace.1 Never has the phrase of Jacques Maritain, ‘‘distinguish in order to unite,’’ been more necessary , yet seemingly more desolate and forgotten. This sad condition is not the fruit of any malign design, but rather the effect of a confluence of many errors—often unintentionally amplified in the heroic effort to suppress their implications without correcting them at the root. Many contemporary Roman Catholic theologians—to the degree that they engage this question—incline to accept an account of the relation of nature and grace that dissolves the entire structure of human nature and its proportionate end into a pure posit or limit concept. It is thought, because concrete nature exists in the context of the call to grace—inserted in the narrative of creation in grace, the fall, and the redemption—that therefore the proportionate natural end either does not exist or does exist but in a fashion so permeated by grace and sin  Introduction as to be unintelligible in its own right. The idea that human reality in concreto includes, but also goes beyond, the natural, and that the natural is indeed knowable through an abstraction which attains a real principle in precision from its mode of existence and the differing relations it may have to God, is simply unthinkable to generations of theologians for whom ‘‘abstraction’’ is something very much like a term of abuse. Yet, at the same time, Hegel, and others for whom being itself is reduced to a mere abstraction, have contributed to this singular and crucial loss of the Catholic intellectual life. The result is that the font of intellectual life is now so dry that Catholic theologians barely know how to think about the proportionate nature of the human ens creatum any longer. For surely it is a crucial failure in logic to assert that, because there is more in the concrete than merely the proportionate ordering of nature, therefore this proportionate ordering of nature does not exist in the concrete or is unknowable in the concrete. This book is written to argue to the contrary. Sed contra: nature is not merely a negative concept, a sort of empty theological Newtonian space providing a hollow ‘‘place’’ or vacuole for grace. And precisely insofar as human nature has an ontological density and proportionate end, just so far is the knowledge of these essential to the work of the theologian. This is precisely why St. Thomas held that grace presupposes nature—not as an empty placeholder, but with its own created perfection positively ordered toward God within natural limits while being capable with divine aid of elevation to divine friendship and the beatific vision. The natural desire for God is precisely a sign of the fittingness of revelation. It is beyond cavil that the etiology of the view that nature is indistinguishable in concreto and a mere limit concept leads us to the interpretation of Aquinas by Henri de Lubac. Further, it leads us to a lowest common denominator concept of obediential potency (shared with Etienne Gilson) that does not acknowledge the full range of diverse types of ‘‘obediential potency’’ and so to a problem that a more careful consideration of Thomas’s teaching would have avoided. Thus, the first consideration of this volume is an essay seeking to provide both a response and perhaps more importantly, an appreciation for the genuine theological ends sought by de Lubac, in the course of responding to, and arguing for a correction of, his teaching. Introduction  But is not all the talk about the proper ontological density of natura merely a Renaissance corruption of the teaching of St. Thomas? No. And the texts that prove this without the least doubt are included in the first chapter...