I first read Henri de Lubac, SJ, as a college student in the late 1950s, when Vatican II was still but a twinkle in Angelo Roncalli’s eye. Among my first discoveries were The Drama of Atheist Humanism and The Splendor of the Church(though the original bore the more modest title Méditation sur l’église). Through my years of theological study in Rome and long years of teaching, Henri de Lubac has been a cherished theological mentor and companion. The illuminating classic, Catholicism, the sprightly Pascal-like Paradoxes, the several probing studies on his friend, Teilhard de Chardin, the late-career (still untranslated) La postérité spirituelle de Joachim de Flore have provided never-failing nourishment and challenge.
And stimulus to prayer. Few other theologians impel so spontaneously from theological reflection to prayerful meditation. Reading de Lubac unclogs the spirit. Perhaps because, as he suggests in his crucial article, “Mysticism and Mystery” (published in Theological Fragments), the whole spiritual-theological journey of his life was to probe the mystery of the faith and to seek to appropriate it in that intimate encounter with and affective knowledge of Christ to which every baptized Christian is called.
Henri de Lubac, as he himself willingly conceded, was not a “systematic” theologian. His many works were more like symphonic variations. But they always explored one central theme: the uniqueness and sheer originality of Jesus Christ. For the mystery that was central to Christian faith was not some indistinct “I know not what,” but the distinctive person of Jesus Christ and his paschal mystery. And the mysticism, which is the Christian’s birthright, is not some esoteric and nebulous flight to the unknown, but a radiant and joyful, if always cruciform, engagement with Jesus Christ. Christian mysticism is being personally conformed to the person of Christ and thus coming into possession of our true inheritance as sons and daughters of the Triune God of Love.
Thus, a pregnant phrase of the second century father of the Church, St. Irenaeus of Lyons, serves as the fecund leitmotif of all de Lubac’s varied writings. Omnem novitatem attulit, semetipsum afferens: Christ brought all newness in bringing himself. A recent book, Salvation in Henri de Lubac, by Eugene R. Schlesinger brings this theme of the absolute newness of Jesus Christ in de Lubac’s thought systematically and convincingly to the fore.
One salient exploration of this newness is de Lubac’s retrieving the patristic notion of the “tri-form body of Christ.” Christ’s mystery unfolds in three inseparable dimensions. There is the unique incarnation of God’s eternal word in the life of Jesus of Nazareth, culminating in his sacrificial death, his resurrection into new life, and his ascension into glory. This is the primary and generative referent of the term.
But inseparably, there is the living Christ’s Eucharistic body, the ongoing source of life to the Church, which is itself Christ’s ecclesial body. Thus, there is a life-giving reciprocity which de Lubac expresses in the formula: “the Church makes the Eucharist, and the Eucharist makes the Church.” Benedict XVI’s teaching in his Apostolic Exhortation, Sacramentum Caritatis, clearly draws upon de Lubac, and exegetes the meaning more fully, in a way completely faithful to de Lubac’s own conviction.
The Eucharist is Christ who gives himself to us and continually builds us up as his body. Hence, in the striking interplay between the Eucharist which builds up the Church, and the Church herself which “makes” the Eucharist, the primary causality is expressed in the first formula: the Church is able to celebrate and adore the mystery of Christ present in the Eucharist precisely because Christ first gave himself to her in the sacrifice of the Cross. The Church’s ability to “make” the Eucharist is completely rooted in Christ’s self-gift to her. Here we can see more clearly the meaning of Saint John’s words: “he first loved us” (1 Jn 4:19). We too, at every celebration of the Eucharist, confess the primacy of Christ’s gift. The causal influence of the Eucharist at the Church’s origins definitively discloses both the chronological and ontological priority of the fact that it was Christ who loved us “first.” For all eternity he remains the one who loves us first. (#14)
Two consequences flow from this realization of the tri-form body of Christ. First, salvation itself, the new life which is the destiny of Christians, is our being incorporated into the body of Christ. This is the new supernatural reality which has been inaugurated through the paschal mystery of Jesus Christ. We become integrated into a network of relations that is constitutive of our new being in Christ. Second, the ecclesial body ever remains dependent upon its head. The concrete Church, both in its historical actualization and in its eternal realization, is no decapitated body, but its very existence is, at every moment, dependent upon the life which the ascended Christ pours out in the Spirit. And the primary means of participating in this life is the gift of the Eucharist.
Thus, the body of the risen-ascended Lord, his Eucharistic body, and his ecclesial body together constitute the new transformed creation that the Triune God is realizing in the world, indeed in the cosmos: “the recapitulation of all in Christ” (Eph 1:10)—verse of especial import for both Irenaeus and de Lubac.
The Second Vatican Council, in proclaiming that Jesus Christ is the unsurpassable fulfillment of God’s revelation to humankind (Dei Verbum) and the salvific light of the nations (Lumen Gentium), thereby echoes themes dear to de Lubac. Indeed, he was an ardent defender of its teaching in the face of what he discerned to be a falling away from this Christocentric concentration. And the Christological devolution, in de Lubac’s view, began even before the Council formally ended, only to gather momentum in the Council’s aftermath.
For this reason, he devoted much of the remaining energy of his last years to writing his massive two volume work, The Spiritual Posterity of Joachim of Fiore. Whatever the historical accuracy of his reading of the twelfth century Calabrian abbot’s prophecy of a third dispensation of the Holy Spirit, there is no doubt that de Lubac discerned the perils of a view of history that called into question the unique significance of Jesus Christ. Indeed, he saw in the postconciliar Church a marked tendency in some quarters to “liberate” the Spirit from a Christological “confinement.” Eugene Schlesinger expresses well de Lubac’s concern regarding these Joachimite initiatives. In de Lubac’s view they compromise “the Christian novelty—[maintaining that] Christ has not, in fact, brought all newness in bringing himself;” and thus they detach “the work of Christ and the Holy Spirit, such that the latter operates independently of the former” (p. 113).
Read it all in What We Need Now
Robert P. Imbelli, a priest of the Archdiocese of New York, is Associate Professor Emeritus of Theology at Boston College. A selection of his essays has been published as Christ Brings All Newness (Word on Fire Academic). A Festschrift in his honor, The Center Is Jesus Christ Himself, was edited by Andrew Meszaros (Catholic University of America Press).
