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2 Nature and the Supernatural Catholic Theologies of Creation and Grace Nature loves to hide. –Heraclitus In 1946, Henri de Lubac published a collection of several historical essays entitled Surnaturel. Most of the essays in the collection had been previously published elsewhere and had been available for more than twelve years by that time, the earliest published in 1930 and the last in 1934.1 The essays investigated different aspects of the idea of the “supernatural” in patristic and medieval theology. De Lubac’s concern was to demonstrate that the dominant teaching of the Catholic tradition was that reference to what lay “beyond” (super) nature had come over time to cease to specify God’s intimate bond with creation and had come instead to mark their separation. When the essays were published together, however, the book sparked immediate controversy. It was de Lubac’s concluding reflection, “Exigence divine et désir naturel” (Divine Demand and Natural Desire), which laid out his own theological interpretation of his historical work, that was responsible for igniting the controversy.2 Garrigou-Lagrange had these ideas in mind when he coined the term new theology to describe the work of de Lubac and his followers.3 As is noted in the previous chapter, it was this controversy that has largely defined the contemporary Catholic discussion of grace and creation. De Lubac was intent on reviving what he believed was the superior holism of the patristic doctrine and demonstrating its continuation in Aquinas. Apart from a minority of objections from scholastic supporters, de Lubac’s argument about the 31 fundamental unity of grace and creation has been accepted by contemporary Catholic theology.4 However, the origin and meaning of the term supernatural was never particularly illuminated by de Lubac’s work, and the term continues to be confidently used among many contemporary theologians in a vague and imprecise way.5 On these questions, the much lesser known work of the medieval historian Artur Landgraf can help to overcome the muddled use of the term.6 Bernard Lonergan was the first to recognize the significance of Landgraf’s work to the Catholic theology of grace. Lonergan’s dissertation drew on Landgraf, whom he read together with Odon Lottin’s work on the will in Aquinas, to develop Aquinas’s teaching on operative grace.7 Landgraf recognized that the idea of the supernatural developed as a way of synthesizing the different points on which the synods of Carthage (412, 416, and 418 ce) and the Second Council of Orange (529 ce) had vindicated Augustine against Pelagius. Landgraf saw medieval theologians continually groping for some unity between the various doctrines—original sin, the need for grace, the vitiation of the will, and the prior operation of grace in faith, justification, and merit—that constituted the heart of the Western theology of grace.8 The synods and councils had not proposed a specific model for holding these affirmations together, and when considered together they posed a particularly thorny set of conceptual problems. As Lonergan put it, commenting on Landgraf’s work, “To know and unequivocally state the doctrine of grace is one thing; it is quite another to ask what precisely is grace, whether it is one or many, if many, what are its parts and their correlation, what is its reconciliation with liberty, what is the nature of its necessity. These speculative issues St. Augustine did not offer to treat, and it is a question without meaning to ask his position on them.”9 Augustine left these matters ambiguous because he conceived of grace as a particular dimension of God’s one act of creating and sustaining,10 and medieval theology followed his lead.11 “The difficulty,” Lonergan said, “was to explain why everything was not grace; after all, what is there that is not a free gift of God?”12 Landgraf demonstrated that that the concept of the supernatural developed a way to resolve this set of issues, and in a way that carried a very specific meaning. Early medieval theologians were particularly bewildered by the need to unite, on the one hand, Augustine’s affirmation of the soul’s intrinsic desire for God with, on the other hand, his doctrine of original sin and the vitiation of the will. Doing so meant resolving two problems. The first was how to distinguish the gratuity of grace from the gratuity of creation, the distinction that fundamentally differentiated Augustine’s theology of grace from 32 | Waiting and Being [18.218...

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