Grace and the Form of Nature and Culture

It is easy likewise to see the reason for de Lubac's return to the Fathers of the Church. Here, in accord with the truest Catholic spirit, he found the resources for the organic view of the nature-grace relation which was required to meet the challenge of the atheism, the secularized world-without-God, of modernity. It is in this context that we can also begin to see why, in a move which has puzzled many, de Lubac saw fit to emphasize the simultaneous significance for the twentieth century of the work of Hans Urs von Balthasar and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

Both Bathasar and Teilhard worked to overcome the extrinsicism of much of post-Tridentine theology, that is, while insisting on the primacy of grace. In an important sense, Balthasar and Teilhard both taught that grace is a form, which, because it is that of the trinitarian God, is thereby the form of love. One might say that Balthasar, perhaps more clearly than any other person of our time, has shown how, in Christ and his Church, this trinitarian love has taken on a christological, marian, and ecclesial form. And one might say that Teilhard, perhaps also as much as anyone else in our time, has shown us how, through Christ and his Church, this trinitarian love has opened onto the cosmos: giving the cosmos itself (already and not-yet) the christological, marian, and ecclesial form face of love. (See the articles on Teilhard by Jean Danielou and de Lubac which are reprinted in Communio 15 (Fall, 1988), 350-360.

Introduction by David L. Schindler of Catholicism and Secularization in America