Surnaturel

Surnaturel is a book written by the Roman-Catholic theologian Henri de Lubac. It stands among his most famous and controversial works.

In this book he traces the historical meaning of the word 'supernatural' and notes a shift in implication. Up to the High Middle Ages, the essential contrast was drawn between 'natural' and 'moral'. After that, the contrast was seen between 'natural and supernatural'. De Lubac is trying here to establish the correct understanding of Aquinas on this subject.

De Lubac began work on the ideas which would eventually appear as Surnaturel in his days as a student in Hastings. De Lubac published several articles in the 1930s which were to make up much of Surnaturel. The development of the book itself, though, was greatly hindered by the war. In June 1940, fleeing the advancing Nazis, de Lubac left Lyon with a bag which included the notebook for Surnaturel, on which he worked for several days. De Lubac stated in later years that the book had taken sufficient shape by 1941 to be ready for review; the nihil obstat was granted in February 1942. However, paper shortages prevented publication. In 1943, while being hunted by the Gestapo, de Lubac fled, again carrying his notebook, this time to Vals. He used the resources in the Vals library to continue his work on the book. Eventually, in October 1945 the Imprimatur was issued, and in 1946, the book was published (though only as an edition of 700 copies, due to ongoing paper shortages).

De Lubac's overall question in Surnaturel is therefore how human persons in the natural order can be interiorly directed to the order of grace that fulfils them, without in the least possessing this grace in anticipation, and without being able at all to claim it for themselves. In the book, de Lubac attempts to show how, in an attempt to answer this question, what he calls "the system of pure nature" had come to prevail in Catholic theology.

He argues that in the Fathers and the great scholastics there was only one concrete order of history, that in which God had made humanity for himself, and in which human nature had thus been created only for a single destiny, which was supernatural. Neither the Fathers nor the scholastics, therefore, ever envisioned the possibility of a purely natural end for human persons attainable by their own intrinsic powers of cognition and volition.

De Lubac argues that this unified vision began to unravel in the thought of theologians such as Denys the Carthusian and, more pertinently, Cajetan. While Denys had argued for a natural end of the human person to which a supernatural end must be 'superadded', he did so consciously in opposition to the teaching of Thomas Aquinas. Cajetan, however, while making a similar argument to Denys, did so while claiming simply to be commenting on Thomas: he therefore introduced the idea of human nature as "a closed and sufficient whole" into Thomism.

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