Meet Henri de Lubac by Rudolf Voderholzer

Author:Rudolf Voderholzer [Voderholzer, Rudolf]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Spiritual & Religion
ISBN: 9781586171285
Publisher: Ignatius Press
Published: 2007-11-30T06:00:00+00:00

The Discovery of God

“To my believing friends, including those who believe that they do not believe.” So reads the dedication that de Lubac placed at the beginning of the first two editions of his book De la connaissance de Dieu (1945, 1948). The book was revised and expanded several times and now is available in English under the title The Discovery of God. Together with The Drama of Atheist Humanism and the later study on Nietzsche, it contains de Lubac’s most important reflections on the question of God. De Lubac did not intend to write a textbook on the subject. His concern, as the dedication already makes clear, is to lead people to the faith and to accompany them along the way of faith.

Can God’s Existence Be Proved?

Catholic theology has always insisted that the knowledge of God does not first come to man through the historical revelation of the Word of God. In the Letter to the Romans, Paul writes that ever since the creation of the world, the invisible reality, eternal power and divinity of God the Creator can be recognized from the works of creation with the aid of reason (Rom 1:19-20). The proof of the existence of God takes its classical form in the quinque viae, the five ways, of Thomas Aquinas (Summa theologiae I, 2, 3), five arguments demonstrating that God exists. The first and simplest way concludes from the existence of movement that there is a final unmoved Mover, which is not just another link in this chain of movements, but rather their basis. And this is—as Thomas says at the conclusion of each of the five ways—what we call God. The First Vatican Council, citing Saint Paul, declared that God “can be known with certitude by the natural light of human reason from created things” (DH 3004 [Dogmatic Constitution concerning the Catholic Faith, chapter 2.1]).

Perhaps because of the aphoristic style of the presentation in De la connaissance de Dieu (pp. 35-66; see DG), de Lubac has been accused of bordering on agnosticism1 (see ASC, p. 81). Yet de Lubac is by no means intent on abandoning the proof of the existence of God or promoting some sort of irrationalism—quite on the contrary. Together with the entire Tradition of Catholic theology, he means to uphold the capability of the human mind to know God. God is not merely a matter of opinion, with some people considering the idea that there is a God a good thing, and others not. The positions of acknowledging the existence of God and denying it have not reached a stalemate, leaving nothing but an arbitrary decision for one of the two possibilities. Belief in God can be supported by incisive reasoning. De Lubac regards the proofs for the existence of God as subsequent systematic expressions of an original, spontaneous recognition of God’s presence.

The classical proofs (of Thomas Aquinas) for the existence of God are based on the principle of causality.2 This very principle was limited by Kant to empirical reality—that

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