Book Review: The Suspended Middle: Henri de Lubac and the Renewed Split in Modern Catholic Theology

Abstract

The Suspended Middle: Henri de Lubac and the Renewed Split in Modern Catholic Theology. By John Milbank. Second edition. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans Publishing, 2014. xiii + 120 pp. $25.00 (paper).In this second edition of The Suspended Middle, not enough has changed substantively so as to suggest that readers familiar with Milbank's position should update their copy. Apart from the new subtitle, other amendments to the text include the addition of a few more historical and contextual qualifiers (like the paragraph about de Lubac's involvement in the Nijmegen Declaration on pp. 7-8), and the insertion of further textual support (like the paragraph about de Lubac's book Brief Catechesis on Nature and Grace on pp. 53-54). Nevertheless, the of the text's publication affords the opportunity for a renewed recommendation to read it. This is a short yet explosive book on Henri de Lubac, which engages and challenges from start to finish.As a text of fewer than 150 pages, the book is not intended as a fulsome historical or theoretical introduction to de Lubac or to the Ressourcement movement (loosely defined) with which he was associated. Yet for the professional who is not a specialist in twentieth-century Catholic thought, and likewise for the graduate student, the book will serve to whet the appetite for further study of a thinker whose thought has been neglected in the Anglophone world: de Lubac's study Surnaturel-which Milbank hails as arguably the key theological text of the twentieth century (p. 3)-has still not been translated into English. And as Milbank highlights the paradoxical quality of de Lubac's ideas about the operation of divine grace within creation, the Thomistic notion of the natural desire for the supernatural, and the doctrine of the imago Dei, readers are of course also afforded a lucid treatment of significant aspects to Milbanks own theological approach and agenda.The books opening chapter establishes de Lubac as a distinctive Catholic voice in wartom Europe who by 1950 and the publication of the encyclical Humani Generis had aroused enough papal suspicion to earn him a temporary ban on teaching and pubhshing. We meet him as a critic of neoScholasticism and commentarial Thomism, and a theologian whose mode of study and argumentation favored a deep attention to history-the tracing out of event and sign in continuous process (p. 13)-rather than an atemporal attention to specific issues and themes. In this note about de Lubac s patient historical method, the reader locates a significant point of divergence between him and Milbank. For as Adam G. Cooper has suggested in his recent book Naturally Human, Supematurally God: Deification in Pre-Conciliar Catholicism ( Fortress Press, 2014), Milbanks references to the evolution of the Christian understanding of salvation as deification (p. …