Each fall, as I prepare to stand before a classroom of undergraduates, required as they are to take my Introduction to Catholic Theology course, I reconsider how to teach the faith most effectively.
This task has become more challenging over the years. Generation Z, the particular group of young people sitting before me these days, is more likely to describe themselves as not having a religion than any other American generation on record. To fill the gap previously held by religion, many are turning to astrology and neo-paganism, and/or binding themselves to increasingly tribal social causes that effectively become their very identities. Christianity seems a thing of the past; indeed, many of their older siblings and parents are #deconstructing from their Christian upbringings, an emerging trend on TikTok and Instagram.
Henri de Lubac (1896–1991), a French cardinal whose cause for canonization was recently opened by the French bishops, seems, on the surface, an unlikely ally for reaching this generation of twenty-first century young people. Yet I have found several aspects of his theology profoundly helpful for teaching theology to undergraduates. Here, I present three of de Lubac’s insights that have resonated well with my Gen Z students, in the hope that these aspects of de Lubac’s thought will help others who preach and teach the faith.
Students naturally desire the supernatural
Central to de Lubac’s theological vision is the idea that the human being naturally desires the God of Jesus Christ. At the root of all the searching of our lives and of all religious expression is ultimately a desire for Him. As Augustine declared, “Our hearts are restless, O Lord, until they rest in You.”
De Lubac articulated this thesis over against the notion, widespread among theologians of his day, that human beings, by nature, only desire purely natural happiness until a new, supernatural end is imparted to nature through sanctifying grace, i.e., at Baptism.
Although it generated much debate, the basic contours of de Lubac’s position have been articulated and affirmed in the Catechism. Paragraph 27 proclaims, “The desire for God is written in the human heart, because man is created by God and for God; and God never ceases to draw man to himself. Only in God will he find the truth and happiness he never stops searching for.” (Chapter 1, no. 27) In short, the human person has a natural desire for the God of Jesus Christ. This is not due to merit or natural capacity but is rather due to God’s intention in creating us.
In the classroom, de Lubac’s thesis inspires me to trust that, in spite of what they may think, students want to hear the Gospel; they desire to know and love God. I do not mean only the theology majors or the homeschool nerds; this principle extends to all: the video-gamers, the theater kids, the athletes, those in a gender identity crisis, the rich, the poor, the devotees of other religious traditions, the burned-out Catholic school kids who want anything but another “religion” class, and so on. Each of these unique and unrepeatable students wants a relationship with God, whether they are consciously aware of it or not. Indeed, in de Lubac’s view, they are already constitutively related to the God of Jesus Christ, in whom each of them was created, regardless of their conscious likes and dislikes.
Of course, in step with the Catholic tradition, de Lubac conditions his thesis by noting that a kind of death needs to occur for us to enjoy union with God. Indeed, there is no easy passage from nature to grace, and the supernatural cannot be attained by our own resources. Nevertheless, these qualifiers do not diminish the fact that all human beings have an appetite for what God wants to give, namely, a participation in his life.
In my experience, trust in this appetite takes the power struggle out of teaching theology. I do not see it as my task to force or impose Christianity. This should perhaps go without saying; however, I hear from many students that imposing religion was the modus operandi of their high school religion and CCD classes. It seems to me that force or imposition arises from lack of trust in students’ natural desire for God.
As Benedict XVI said in conversation with Peter Seewald, “The truth comes to rule, not through violence, but rather through its own power”;1 and as de Lubac’s close friend, St. John Paul II, proclaimed, “The Church proposes; she imposes nothing.” (Redemptoris Missio, 39) The truth may be proposed with confidence if one believes, with de Lubac, that all people naturally desire God, who is truth in Person. All students are made in the image of God and bear within themselves the natural desire for him.
Accepting this thesis, my job, then, is not to impose truth, but to awaken students’ innate yearning for Him, and, subsequently, to show how the Christian faith corresponds to our natural desire while exceeding the bounds of it.
Peaceful competition
In his 1968 reflection on the Second Vatican Council’s treatment of atheism, de Lubac writes, “[W]e Christians want to show by a sort of peaceful competition, in deeds as well as words, that ‘we also, we Christians, we, more than anyone else have the cult of man,’”2 that is, the cause of the human person. De Lubac’s peaceful competition idea is a way of engaging with non-Christian modes of thought while neither imposing Christianity on unwilling subjects nor pluralistically affirming other traditions as equally valid paths to God. It is an apologetical method rooted in showing, not forcing.
In my classroom, I employ de Lubac’s “peaceful competition” idea in two ways. First, through recourse to his book, The Drama of Atheist Humanism (French original published in 1944), I show students that atheism has historically been bad for the human person. As de Lubac writes, “It is not true, as is sometimes said, that man cannot organize the world without God. What is true is that, without God, he can ultimately only organize it against man. Exclusive humanism is inhuman humanism.”3 De Lubac’s basic point is that to deny God is also to deny human flourishing. True humanism is Christian humanism.
De Lubac proves this point by engaging the atheisms of Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Auguste Comte — major atheists of the nineteenth century whose thought profoundly influenced the twentieth century. These figures all sought to free the human being from belief in God in order to exalt the human race. Their common rallying cry was something to the effect of God must decrease so that humanity might increase. Belief in God, they argued, threatens human greatness; the imaginary figure called “God” is human greatness alienated from itself and projected onto a fictive big screen; thus, for human beings to be great, they must eradicate God.
De Lubac shows that, despite their best efforts to the contrary, each of these atheists and their systems ultimately failed the human being. Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, and Comte all absorb the human person into a greater whole, whether that is Communist or Positivist society or Nietzsche’s mystical Eternal Return. None of their systems were capable of upholding personal dignity and distinction.
If this critique sounds abstract, de Lubac’s analysis is proven by the witness of the twentieth century, the bloodiest on record. Regimes inspired by these atheisms, such as Bolshevik Communism and Nazism, resulted in massive loss of human life and violation of fundamental human rights. Indeed, de Lubac wrote Drama during the Second World War while on the run from the Gestapo for his work hiding Jews. His intention was to show his fellow Christians the atheistic roots of Nazism and Communism.
In contrast to the deleterious effects of atheism, de Lubac shows how Christianity champions the human person. Our relationship with God paradoxically safeguards our immanence or proper autonomy. Not only is our existence contingent upon Him, but without God, the categories of human dignity, human rights, ethics, and so on lack any real foundation. With God, on the other hand, the human being was freed in the ancient world from the shackles of Fate (e.g. in astrology and capricious gods) and declared to have free will.4 In the present age, God still frees the human being from the pressures of oppressive regimes, trans-humanism, Darwinist and Calvinist theories of determinism, and so on by giving the human being a transcendent orientation and foundation, so that we are not simply victims of the forces of this world.
Second, I rely on de Lubac’s peaceful competition idea while comparing the major worldviews of today, which I identify as pantheism, monotheism, and materialism. Although these categories are not all-encompassing, they give us a basic working model to start a conversation about comparative religion. This is especially urgent as students today are very intrigued by Eastern thought while many simultaneously embrace materialism in their daily decisions. Both alternatives seem more appealing than the Christian heritage that many of my students share.
Through recourse to de Lubac’s books on Buddhism, I show that pantheistic systems affirm the reality of spirit but do not account for the otherness of matter or of persons. Everything is one; since matter and personal distinction are principles of differentiation, they are seen as illusory. The end goal of pantheist systems like Buddhism is for the artifice of the self to dissolve like a drop in the ocean. Buddhist charity is not directed to the good of the other as other, since the other, properly speaking, does not exist. Rather, charitable works are a practice in divesting oneself of the ego and attachments.
On the other side of the spectrum, atheist materialism affirms the reality of matter, yet denies spirit. Insofar as it only affirms one kind of reality, materialism, like pantheism, is also a monism. Moreover, because everything, according to this system, is simply matter, materialism likewise cannot account for personal distinction or dignity. If everything is just matter, then nothing matters. Human beings are simply clumps of cells, albeit highly advanced ones and at different stages of development. Spirit, the principle that makes your particular existence unique and unrepeatable, does not exist.
Between the monisms of pantheism and materialism is monotheism. I place Christianity, Judaism, and Islam between pantheism and materialism because they account for the goodness of both matter and spirit. God creates a material world other than himself (i.e. that is not an extension of himself) and calls it good. This world is not merely material: at least in the Judeo-Christian account, the human being is a unity of matter and spirit (dirt and breath), and the world is ripe with sacramental meaning (thus, a fruit is not just a piece of matter, but has a bearing on Adam and Eve’s relationship with God).
Because they account for both matter and spirit, monotheistic religions account for the most amount of reality. It follows that they “win” the “peaceful competition.”
Of course, this method is by no means neutral; I, as a monotheist and a metaphysical realist, am presuming that matter and spirit are real and then showing how monotheism accounts for them. One could say that the argument is tautological. Nevertheless, the method shows that monotheism offers a fuller account of our experience of reality than the other worldviews. Human beings both experience the material world and have to account for that — even if their account is saying that the material world is just an illusion, they are still recognizing it as a foundational experience. We have also always had some sense of the transcendent, whether we have expressed this sense in organized religion, gods and goddesses, or a vague sense of spirituality.
In any case, monotheism accounts for both of these human experiences, that is, matter and spirit, more thoroughly than pantheism or materialism. As de Lubac’s friend Hans Urs von Balthasar wrote, “Whoever sees more of the truth is more profoundly right.”5 Monotheism is more all-encompassing and so, I argue, triumphs in the peaceful competition.
How to teach the Trinity
Finally, de Lubac has significantly shaped how I teach what some have called the “preacher’s nightmare,” the Trinity.
The key to de Lubac’s Trinitarian theology, much like Hans Urs von Balthasar’s, is that the Trinity is a mystery of unity and diversity which grounds the possibility of unity and diversity in the world and sheds light on the relationship between these poles. Even before Balthasar developed this thesis, de Lubac debuted it in his 1938 seminal work, Catholicism. There, he argues that the simultaneity of unity and diversity in creation is a trace, or reflection, of the Trinitarian God. By unity and diversity, he is referring to phenomena like marriage or a team, wherein persons are simultaneously united (one flesh, one team) and yet distinct (husband and wife, or pitcher and catcher, etc.). He also points to complex plants which are one and yet have distinct parts.
De Lubac’s argument is that the unity-in-diversity of marriage, of a team, and even of a complex plant are not just brute facts. Rather:
It is faith itself . . . that brings us right up to the truth. . . . For do we not believe that there are three Persons in God? It is impossible to imagine greater distinctions than those of this pure threefold relationship, since it is these very distinctions that constitute them in their entirety. And do they not arise in unity, the unity of the one same Nature?”6
Because God is a mystery of unity and diversity, these qualities are reflected in creation, albeit in an analogous way — meaning any similarity that exists between God and creation is relative to an ever-greater dissimilarity. Nevertheless, the similarity is real. Unity and diversity, or, as the philosophers say, the one and the many, are not just random facts; they co-exist in creation because they reflect the unity and diversity that exists in God, who is one God in three Persons. De Lubac’s point is that, while we could never have figured out that God is Trinity on our own steam, the Trinity, once revealed, sheds a light on creation and explains some of its mysteries.
So, in class, I begin by presenting Thomas Jefferson’s anti-Trinitarian statement: “It is far too late in the day for men of sincerity to pretend they believe in the Platonic mysticisms that three are one, and one is three; and yet the one is not three and the three are not one.”7 Then, relying on de Lubac’s insight about unity and diversity, we consider the simultaneity of unity and diversity throughout creation, and how that relationship is illuminated in the light of the Trinitarian God. Viewed through the lens of God’s created analogies and reflections, the Trinity becomes more intelligible.
Furthermore, I apply de Lubac’s Trinitarian theology to the “peaceful competition” mentioned above. Having shown that monotheism accounts for a greater amount of reality than pantheism or materialism, insofar as it accounts for both spirit and matter, I then show how the specifically Christian, Trinitarian faith accounts for even more of our experience of reality than other monotheistic religions.
Specifically, God creates a world that is other than himself (as opposed to a pantheistic extension of himself) and calls it fundamentally good not only because God decides to do so, but because distinction, or otherness, is a feature of God’s Trinitarian nature. As one God in three Persons, there is what can analogously be called “otherness” in God: the Father is not the Son, the Son is not the Father, and so on. This feature of otherness in God’s very being provides a rationale for why God would create a world that is simultaneously united with him, insofar as it is contingent, and yet distinct from him, insofar as the world is not God—and why both qualities of unity and distinction can be called good.
While this point is admittedly more Balthasarian than de Lubacian, de Lubac’s own theology of unity and diversity lays the groundwork for Balthasar and others to connect the dots in this way. The unity-in-diversity of spirit and matter, and the unity-in-diversity of God’s relationship to the world, is contained within or made possible by the unity-in-diversity that is God’s very being.
Although this may sound abstract, in the context of the classroom, students often report that the Trinity lecture is their favorite of the semester. To make the point about unity and diversity, we look at other unities-in-diversities, like the diversity of ages, races, and sexes within the unity of the human race, or even the diversity of breeds of dogs — from chihuahuas to labs to poodles — which look nothing alike and yet all participate in the same nature of dog. These phenomena are not suitable Trinitarian analogies, yet they are instances of unity and diversity in creation that the Trinitarian revelation can shed light on, e.g. why dogs are neither endlessly different to the point that identifying them as dogs would be impossible, nor are they all simply the same.
Contrary to the claims of Thomas Jefferson, one and three do indeed exist simultaneously, in a relationship of unity and distinction.
Conclusion
De Lubac’s brilliance is not limited to these three areas. His ecclesiology, his detailed historical studies on the Eucharist and on the pure nature hypothesis, and his studies on major figures like Origen of Alexandria and Joachim of Fiore are profound. Yet it is the areas of his thought highlighted above that have captured the attention of my Introduction to Catholic Theology students.
In his autobiography, de Lubac wrote, “The sole passion of my life is the defense of our faith.”8 Whether or not de Lubac’s cause for canonization is successful, his life’s passion continues to bear fruit today as he reaches the minds and hearts of young people. I hope that the three ways in which he helps me to teach undergraduates may also aid others who preach and teach the faith.
- Pope Benedict XVI and Peter Seewald, Light of the World: The Pope, the Church, and the Signs of the Times, trans. Michael J. Miller and Adrian J. Walker (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2010), 51. ↩
- Henri de Lubac, “Nature and Grace” in The Word in History, ed. T. Patrick Burke (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1966), 26. ↩
- De Lubac, The Drama of Atheist Humanism (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995), 14. ↩
- De Lubac writes that with the Christian idea of the man, “man was freed, in his own eyes, from the ontological slavery with which Fate burdened him. The stars, in their unalterable courses, did not, after all, implacably control our destinies. Man, every man, no matter who, had a direct link with the Creator, the Rule of the stars themselves. And lo, the countless Powers — gods, spirits, demons — who pinioned human life in the net of their tyrannical wills, weighing up on the soul with all their terrors, now crumbled into dust, and the sacred principle that had gone astray in them was rediscovered unified, purified and sublimated in God the deliverer! It was no longer a small and select company that, thanks to some secret means of escape, could break the charmed circle: it was mankind as a whole that found its night suddenly illumined and took cognizance of its royal liberty. No more circle! No more blind destiny! No more Moira! No more Fate! Transcendent God, God the ‘friend of men,’ revealed in Jesus, opened for all a way that nothing would ever bar again. Hence that intense feeling of gladness and of radiant newness to be found everywhere in early Christian writings.” De Lubac, Drama of Atheist Humanism, 23. ↩
- Hans Urs von Balthasar, Epilogue, trans. Edward T. Oakes, S.J. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), 15. ↩
- De Lubac, Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man, trans. Lancelot C. Sheppard and Sister Elizabeth Englund, OCD (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988), 329. ↩
- Quoted in Martin Albl, Reason, Faith, and Tradition: Explorations in Catholic Theology, Revised Edition (Winona, MN: Anselm Academic, 2015), 121. ↩
- De Lubac, At the Service of the Church, trans. Anne Elizabeth Englund (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993), 324. ↩
About Dr. Sara Hulse Kirby
Dear Dr. Sara Hulse Kirby,
The Peace of Christ this Eastertide!
It is great to read an account that echoes my own thoughts on the subject of the relevance of ‘unity and diversity’ to both the created world and, in particular, the mystery of man and woman and, indeed, the very nature of the human person; and, as such, it has featured prominently in my investigation, “Human Nature: Moral Norm”, wherein I argue that a person is an irreducible ‘unity-in-diversity’.
If you are interested in looking at the book itself, there is a copy of it in the hpr list of books for review.
God bless, Francis.
Ps. I also found helpful your account of the student cohort, as it helps to flesh out what views, as it were, are coming through in contemporary student society.
A trenchant piece giving hope for Gen Z and those who teach or connect in some way with them.
I appreciate the description of ‘imposition’ versus ‘proposition,’ as well as De Lubac’s attractive three arguments, which in my opinion correlate well with classical philosophy and Christian personalism.