Why study... Henri de Lubac with John Milbank

[Music] hello and welcome to the Department of Theology and religious studies here at the University of Nottingham today I'm talking to John Milbank who is Professor of religion politics ICS and ethics hello John hello Simon we're going to talk today about uh HRI dubac uh key 20th Century theologian I know you've done a lot of work on over the last few years um before we start talking about Dubach specifically and his importance I wonder if we could set the scene a little bit could you tell us something about the state of theology Catholic theology at the turn of the 20th century that formed dubac's thought yes well this is often described as manual theology um and what this meant was that people tended not to study primarily the Bible or study primarily the great Christian thinkers of the past but to study digests o of of these thinkers um which were turning them into a kind of false synthesis and there was a um a sense of accumulated wisdom that didn't pay any attention to temporal context and and so on as if the story of Catholic thought was just a story of gradual Improvement and uh it was also presented in a very kind of cut and Dy deduction from first principles kind of way you know here are the facts of revation and from this if we apply reason certain things follow it was rather arid in a word right so that was associated with people like Reginal Gary Gulag Grange yes uh well I mean this had been going on for a very long time but he he's perhaps the most famous of the the so-called manual um thas and the irony is that he's sort of very rationalist and very empiricist in actually a rather Modern Way even though he's um developing a system of thought that's supposed to be resistant to modernity right so this is what formed HRI dubac and uh tell us a little bit about his life to start with um well he he he was born in the north of France and uh he spent some time in Hastings in the south of England in in in a Jesuit house there he was uh very badly wounded in the head in the first World War uh very traumatized um by that um initially seen as an for ter very much uh self-educated really rather little formal training um somebody really challenging the entire received structure uh of Catholic thinking and yet at the end of his life totally rehabilitated seeing seen as one of the architects of Vatican 2 and by the end of his life often regarded as a conservative and indeed somebody who had you know a lot of doubts about some aspects of Vatican 2 that he'd actually never been in favor of in the first place for example aspects of the lurgical reform right so if we go back to dubac's work itself he publishes this work suel in in French translated as the mystery of the supernatural that was really groundbreaking I think what was it about that work actually that mystery of the Supernatural is a later work um um s natural is is still being translated the the initial the initial work and it was really um a collection of quite disperate essays um and historical studies not something that you would obviously think of this is revolutionary but it was revolutionary precisely because the whole way of looking at things since um the Barack period since you know roughly the 17th century um was to make a very sharp distinction between nature and Grace and between reason and Faith um so the idea was that there's a kind of autonomy to the Natural realm the the realm in which um you have human ethics you have politics you have theories of art uh and and and so on and so forth and and also philosophic iCal conclusions and that can all go on quite independently of Revelation um maybe without reference to God although within this realm you can have rational arguments that establish the bare existence of God and then on top of that you have Revelation which tends uh uh the thinking about Revelation tends also to revolve in its own Circle you have certain revealed propositions and from these uh you deduce certain things um certain consequences certain probabilities follow this is also very rationalistic even though it has a rather kind of fistic starting point because there's no joint between um these two things um and what um hre dubac did was uh remind the world that for the church fathers both Latin and Greek and for most of the Scholastics U up to the time of aquinus um there was in fact a paradoxical natural desire for the supernatural um so that nature wasn't regarded as complete in itself it was regarded as being in a in a kind of anticipation a waiting for Revelation which will alone complete uh human existence even alone complete the cosmos so a much more um historical attitude and you know history was what the manuals had really ignored both history and the whole realm of of imagination and mediation um by images if if you like um in the Middle Ages there' been the idea of the book of Nature and the book of the Bible and the idea that you can only really read these books together and hre dubac is really restoring that so he's saying um in a way he's saying that um Revelation is is much more important for natural thinking than people thought but on the other hand natural thinking is much more important for thinking about the Bible than people thought so and this is one reason why he can be read two ways as either a conservative or a liberal but to grasp him you have to hold on to both aspects and see that he's neither liberal nor conservative um he's thinking through the original radicalism of Orthodoxy if you like to put it that way right so we can see him as part of this resour all movement um absolutely and and that's uh a movement looking not to deny the work of the Scholastics but to say that they are reflecting on if you like the more fundamental thought of the church fathers which is much more attendant to history symbolism biblical exeresis narrative it's not hastening on to quickly to speculative and dialectical um issues it's not that these people denied the importance of all that uh um not at all but but the aim was there had been an idea that really aquinus is sort of up so well all this patristic Legacy you don't actually need to go back to these authors themselves the result theologians thought that aquinus himself would be horrified by by that attitude he wouldn't been that arrogant and that we we need to carry on doing precisely what he was doing you know look at all the authorities um the ancient philosophers the Bible the the fathers and and and keep meditating um on on those sources and and precisely by not going back to the s s is we'd got a kind of caricatured view of what aquinus thought especially attributing to aquinus this sharp separation between nature and Grace and not seeing that there's not just uh you know natural questioning about what's the origins of everything but a a positive kind of erotic lure of something obscure and it's a paradox because Revelation is a free gift and so how how do you anticipate something that has not yet arrived and and of course the answer is that in a way that's always obscurely latent you know that God it's impossible for God to create without creating human beings and without orientating human beings back to him the whole thing goes around in a circle and if you read it qu as carefully there's no question but that that's the way he thinks it's only if you take a few passages that make distinctions to be sure between nature and Grace um and don't look at the bigger picture which makes it clear that these distinctions are relative distinctions they're not absolute distinctions and it's remarkable the rues to which people are still going you know to try to deny something that's not really open to debate right could you say something about one of dubac's other very important Publications Corpus mysticum which is another historical study that he's very well known for what's Corpus mysticum all about about the mystical body well in a way this was equally revolutionary because uh extraordinarily enough um thinking about the church had come to be quite judicial sort of pragmatic terms so that uh and the sacraments particularly Eucharist was seen as kind of like an isolated miracle and then the people in charge of this miracle had great power but that that was often thought of in all two worldly ways the kind of thing you know that some of the the reformers were quite rightly worried about but HRI dubc is suggesting that their diagnoses are not are not quite right and that the whole problem is um that we lost the sense of the connection between the Eucharistic body and um the body of the church um and and that later on people started to talk about the church as primarily the mystical body whereas earlier at the Eucharist was the mystical body the and and the church was the True Body of Christ and and so the the loss of this sense that the presence of Christ in the Eucharist can't be separated from his presence in the congregation and that this presence in the congregation really is in a sense a continuation of of the Incarnation so the church has both a christological aspect as well as a numerological aspect that was still led by by the spirit and and and therefore you know the physicality of the church Church you know it's incarnation in society something that resonates with a lot of Anglican theology in the sense that the church itself is the true Society in another very famous book Catholicism um dubac really renewed the social thinking of the church by stressing that it's it's not the church saying what politicians should do it's the church itself um that goes beyond politics and anticipates to some degree the kingdom thank you very much indeed John that's all we have time for today we hope that you'll be able to join us again for another of our films in the theology department at the University of Nottingham thank [Music] you [Music]

Channel: University of Nottingham

Views: 32,662

Keywords: theology, church, Thomism, religion, nature, Eucharist, grace, Catholic, John Milbank, Aquinas, Henri de Lubac, Simon Oliver, University of Nottingham, Nottingham University, scholasticism, Arts

Id: aVTO0DvuNXE

Length: 12min 8sec (728 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 26 2011