Extrinsicism?: Revisiting the Preconciliar Theology of Nature and Grace

Abstract

Extrinsicism?:Revisiting the Preconciliar Theology of Nature and Grace David L. Augustine Introduction The lives of even the most virtuous people are complex wholes and can be cast in different lights depending on the speaker's vantage point and personal agenda. Thus, for Roman Catholics, Theresa of Calcutta is a saint. For Christopher Hitchens, she is a self-righteous fraud.1 Mother Theresa's works of corporal mercy are capable of wildly different interpretations based on one's presuppositions. Much the same holds true for the complex doctrines of venerable theological schools. Their doctrines can be characterized in different ways depending on the speaker's historical moment, personal history, and even prejudices. In this light, the aim of this essay is a simple one: to correct the common conception of what Karl Rahner vaguely calls the "average textbook-conception on the relationship between nature and grace"2 and what many scholars associated with the nouvelle théologie associate with the early [End Page 791] twentieth-century manualist approach to nature and grace. Namely, I will aim to show that the neo-Scholastics were not "extrinsicists" in any negative sense of the term. In the first part of the essay, I will briefly present several of the critiques of the preconciliar "textbook" theology as found in the writings of Karl Rahner, Henri de Lubac, and Louis Bouyer. Again, my focus is on their concern that the manuals are "extrinsicist" in their understanding of nature and grace. In the second part, I will respond to the above characterization via extensive recourse to the neo-Scholastic literature. The Supernatural as Extrinsic Superstructure? By the mid-twentieth century, the conception of the interrelationship between nature and the supernatural in the manuals was regularly being dubbed as "extrinsicist" by its opponents.3 For example, Karl Rahner begins his essay "Concerning the Relationship between Nature and Grace" by noting that the "average teaching on grace," or again "the average textbook-conception of the relationship between nature and grace," does indeed present a teaching on their relationship that can fairly be described as "extrinsecism [sic]."4 By "extrinsicism," Rahner means that human nature has first been conceived of as "sharply circumscribed" and "oriented to the nature of less than human things."5 Next, to nature defined thusly, "supernatural grace," according to Rahner, "can only be the superstructure [Überbau] lying beyond the range of human experience imposed upon a human 'nature' which … turns in its own orbit [in sich selber kreist] (though with a relationship peculiar to itself to the God of creation)."6 Grace thus comes [End Page 792] as a "purely external 'decree' of God" which "disturb[s] [gestört]" a nature that, in the present economy, is otherwise equivalent to the "man of 'pure nature.'"7 Henri de Lubac, in his late A Brief Catechesis on Nature and Grace, makes a similar if more sharply-pointed charge, noting that the new "Thomist" position posits a nature-grace relationship that can be described as "two juxtaposed realities (two 'natures'), or, if one prefers, two realities the second of which would be superimposed on the other, while both remained exterior to the other."8 De Lubac, of course, rejects this understanding of grace as a "supernature,"9 since the nature-grace relationship is not about "two substantial natures, incapable of copenetrating each other, one of which would override the other."10 Louis Bouyer's assessment of the problem is similar to de Lubac's. In his Introduction to Spirituality, Bouyer alleges that the extrinsicist conception arose from a misunderstanding of the Scholastic doctrine of created grace. From this starting point, he avers, "grace as created was taken as a pretext for representing it as a second nature, a 'supernature' superimposed on our original nature."11 However, so Bouyer notes, this conception is false because grace is not a new nature or supernature, but is rather "as it were a new 'accident' inserted into the substance of the soul, fitting it as a soul to live the very life of God."12 In the most intimate connection with the falsification of the notion of grace or the supernatural, many authors likewise note that the Scholastic [End Page...