Sin, Human Nature, and Divine Grace with Henri De Lubac
Assigned reflections on assigned texts for my Sacraments masters course at the University of Notre Dame.
Christ in the Garden of Gethsamane, Arkhyp Kuindzhi (1901)
Before converting from Evangelicalism to Catholicism a decade ago, I held an understanding of sin as the defining feature of human nature. As I understood it, sin was essentially unavoidable for people, even with the assistance of divine grace. While there is truth in this view about the difficulties of overcoming sin, it ultimately diminishes the freedom God gives humanity to choose and enact the good. It also seemed to be used as a way to brush off abuses in Christian community. It is difficult, for instance, to confront someone about a serious moral failing when you are met with a defeatist-defensive shrug, Well, I’m not perfect. I’m just a sinner!
Although this attitude might be more or less reflective of particular Protestant theologies in practice, it certainly is not exclusive to Protestant communities, as many of the harrowing accounts of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church communicate. It is one expression of a larger issue. We are in need of a proper account of the relationship between divine grace and human nature. Such an account will certainly not, on its own, “fix everything” and vanquish abuse altogether, but it will do well to aid us in our love for Christ and for each other — goals that are integral to overcoming abuse and redeeming the created order. We’ll thus explore some of the key insights and nuances of this relationship (and the place of sin within it) as articulated in the text of 20th Century Theologian Henri de Lubac: A Brief Catechesis on Nature & Grace.
Created to Receive
We’ll begin by sketching out de Lubac’s articulation of the relationship between the divine nature and human nature. Then, we will unpack it!
The divine nature, as it is revealed in Jesus Christ and offered to us in the life of the Holy Spirit, is what human nature is ultimately made for. The “supernatural” (the divine nature offered to human nature) is thus not “an arbitrary ‘something extra’” added to man, nor “a form extrinsic” to him, but a process of “adoption” and a “transformation which ensures both the union and the distinction” of human and divine nature, through the bond of love (Nature and Grace, 48). Our human nature is intended to be penetrated by the divine nature, and even though this penetration is anticipated in our being, the divine nature is never something originating from within us (48).
On the Direction of Divine Grace
Indeed, De Lubac is not an intrinsicist: he does not claim that creation already carries within itself the divine nature. The human creature cannot reach or find God ‘by walking forward on the same level’, seeking to find the divine in nature (whether it be in outer space or within oneself!) for God is entirely transcendent of nature (32). The infinite abyss dividing Creator and creature can only be bridged by the one capable of bridging an infinite divide. Thus, it is only “by the marvelous intention of divine charity” — which always condescends to us — that the human person encounters the divine (32). The divine nature is, in this way, a gift, which the human creature can never possess as her own (42). Even when human nature comes to share in the divine nature, the divine life will forever remain “un-naturalizable”, as it lies outside of the created order (32).
That said, while divine grace always comes from the transcendent God who condescends, we human-folk have been created in such a way that we are disposed to receive it. This is by virtue of our freedom and rationality: our human faculties given to us by God, that naturally orient us to him. Thus, our freewill and reason are never suppressed by an authentic act of Christian conversion, but integral to it. They are, in a sense, the sails of the human spirit, fashioned there by God in creation, and set in motion by the winds of the Spirit, the moment the believer freely accepts the invitation to chart the course into the life of God. Saint John of the Cross (who de Lubac quotes) eloquently captures this dynamic: “‘the supernatural permeates and spiritualizes the natural order, without, for all that, depriving it of its rights and its riches’” (86) — “rights” and “riches'' which are given by God himself and orient the creature toward his life.
The Distortion of Sin: Rejecting the God Who Condescends
De Lubac urges us, however, to not forget about sin in our sense of reality, for sin is a part of the human condition (as its distortion or disease) and not neutral to the divine nature, but antagonistic to it. Our sinfulness shouldn’t be understood as a mere rebellious refusal to follow the divine law. No, it is more personal (and insidious, even) than that: sin is one’s personal refusal of God’s merciful, gratuitous invitation “to share in his life” (169). Thus, between divine grace and sinful human nature,
we have not only a dissimilarity, a heterogeneity between two orders of being, an infinite distance that man alone cannot bridge. There is an antagonism, violent conflict…Between grace and sin the struggle is irreconcilable. Consequently the call of grace is no longer an invitation to a simple ‘elevation’, not even a ‘transforming’ one… in a more radical fashion it is a summons to a ‘total upheaval’, to a ‘conversion’ (of the ‘heart’, i.e. of all one’s being). (119)
Before our nature can be truly “elevated” (to use the traditional language of the Church and Vatican II) and transfigured by the divine nature, we must first, argues de Lubac, freely consent to our sinful nature being ‘turned inside out’ by divine grace (120-121). It is up to each of us to be freely remolded and exorcised in this way (86) — not by our own creaturely agendas, which will always fail, but by receiving and accepting the Creator’s invitation to his life.
The Call: Recovering the “Mode and Rhythm” of Christianity
There is no room for “But I’m just a sinner!”-shrugs in the Christian life. We are made not for sin, but for God, who turns sinfulness inside out with our freely willed active reception of his will. To follow Jesus Christ — who, even as the Son of God, “did not regard equality with God as a thing to be grasped” (Phil 2:6) — we sinful creatures must thus renounce the “metaphysics of self-sufficiency” (69) and embrace humility. Humility is not just one virtue among others, but, as Charles Péguy identifies it, the very “mode and rhythm” of Christianity (58). Indeed, humility is the receptive disposition that the human creature is made for, for it
‘places in the first rank the existence of a personal God, all powerful and omnipresent, who takes the first step towards man. It is the humility of the most Blessed Virgin in the magnificat that enables the creature to understand itself in its total dependence on God….The logic of the Gospel is inspired by this humility of Christ, the One who is both God and man, a humility central to the Christmas mystery.’ (Pope Paul VI, 63)
