Natura Pura: On the Recovery of Nature in the Doctrine of Grace by Steven A. Long (review)

636 BOOK REVIEWS contemporary theology must critically rethink the issues raised by Surnaturel to better achieve the "difficult equilibrium." Institute ofPastoral Theology ofAve Maria University Ave Maria, Florida LAWRENCE FEINGOLD Natura Pura: On the Recovery ofNature in the Doctrine ofGrace. By STEVEN A. LONG. New York: Fordham University Press, 2010. Pp. 282. $65.00 (cloth). ISBN 978-0-8232-3105-8. The sifting and resifting of Henri de Lubac's Surnaturel, its implications and its consequences, proceeds apace. The subtitle of Long's book, On the Recovery ofNature in the Doctrine ofGrace, aptly tells us the aim of its first two chapters, where Long deals directly first with de Lubac and second with Hans Urs von Balthasar. However, Long goes on to say something about how the recovery of nature is to be effected (chap. 3) and the need for its recovery in thinking out in what terms the Church is to stake out her place in the public square (chap. 4). Long defends two theses against de Lubac. First, human nature has and must have a proportionate natural end if it is to be a nature at all. Second, God need not have called our actually existing and divinely chosen human nature to a strictly supernatural end. As to the first thesis, Long faults de Lubac for being insufficiently philosophical to see the wreck he makes of any nature in denying it a proportionate end. As to the second, de Lubac is wrong to see the assertion of this thesis as severing a real openness to and genuine suitability for the supernatural end of the vision of God. De Lubac thinks this, according to Long, because he reduces all obediential potency to the general potency whereby God can perform miracles, making bread from stones. He ignores the notion of a specific obediential potency, whereby what is in potency is not abolished, but perfected and according to the way (albeit superabundantly) it is perfected by its own proportionate natural end. Long thinks it incumbent upon him also to discern and honor the theological intention motivating de Lubac's position. He does this by noting the ideological circumstances in which de Lubac worked. Modern philosophy had already denatured Aristotle's physis by scrapping teleology and relegating what remained of it to a world in which the writ of God's providence no longer ran. Much of modern theology, culminating with Luis de Molina, had severed human freedom from divine causality. It was these things that separated man from God, not nature understood as St. Thomas understood it, ordered to a proportionate natural end naturally attainable. Since the natural connections of human nature to God had been severed in early modernity, de Lubac, in Long's telling of the BOOK REVIEWS 637 story, makes them supernatural from the outset, "hot-wiring" nature to grace by proposing vision as the only end of human nature as it de facto exists. In this way, alas, de Lubac joins in modernity's attack on nature when the true solution is the restoration of nature. In all this, Long does good work, and his reading of St. Thomas is largely supported by the magisterial work of Lawrence Feingold. In one important way, however, Long disagrees with Feingold. Long follows Cardinal Cajetan in reading question 12, article 1 of the Prima Pars, on the natural desire to see God. It is, for Long, not a natural desire to know the essence of God, but rather a desire to know the essence of God as cause of the world, where these two specifications of object are supposed to declare a real distinction. Feingold, following Domingo Banez, Francisco Suarez, and many others, makes the object of the desire the knowledge of the essence of God indeed, but has it that the desire for that object is conditional. This seems to me to have the advantage of moving nature closer to grace than does Long, and therefore of supplying de Lubac's desiderata more fully (which is not to forget that de Lubac dashed cold water on both positions). What becomes of nature once de Lubac has "hot-wired" it to grace by replacing its proportionate end with the supernatural...