Number DOI: http://doi.org/10.33209/2519-4348-2707-9627-2023-11-148

VB. – № 11, 2023. – P. 321-340

Summary

For the Catholic intellectual tradition, the 20th century was marked by several radical and repeatedly debated turns. One of them was carried out in the mid-1940s by Henri de Lubac – the eminent patrologist and historian of Christian theology – and his revolutionary research named Surnaturel. De Lubac overcame established scholastic clichés and caused a paradigm shift in Catholic metaphysics by reinterpreting the traditional Thomistic vision of reality, at the same time broadening the understanding of the interaction between nature and the supernatural, grace and the created world. The article substantiates that de Lubac was keen to demonstrate and convincingly prove that the idea of “pure nature”, devoid of any influences from the realm of the supernatural, is an artificial and late theological concept, if compared to the emergence of St. Thomas’s conceptual synthesis in the 13th century. The research also traces the implicit influence of the radical disidentification of natural and supernatural orders of being on the emergence of theologizing and philosophizing in immanent categories and relentless strengthening of secularization processes in the Western world. It has been found out that the decisive role in the ontologization of the chasm between the natural and the supernatural belongs to Thomas Cajetan, Denys the Carthusian, Diego Laínez, and Francisco Suárez: their treatises turned out to be not so much the continuation of the original system of Aquinas himself, but rather the cause of the in-depth deformation of the authentic ideological line of St. Thomas, while Suárez may be regarded as the true founder of modern theological discourse, but not the skillful and accurate interpreter of medieval scholastic systems. In addition, the research also allows us to draw a conclusion about the strong connection between de Lubac’s revision of the two orders of being and his distinct anti-totalitarian political position, which revealed itself both in various forms of social resistance, as well as in de Lubac’s intellectual deconstruction of the neo-pagan, anti-theistic form of lifeless, individualistic humanism, which ignored the relational essence of the human person and did not take into account its intentional focus on God and neighbor.

Key words: nouvelle théologie, Church Fathers, Scholasticism, Thomism, pura natura, anthropology, ecclesiology.

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