亨利·德吕巴克

Henri-Marie Joseph Sonier de Lubac (French: [lybak]; 20 February 1896 – 4 September 1991), better known as Henri de Lubac, was a French Jesuit priest and cardinal who is considered one of the most influential theologians of the 20th century. His writings and doctrinal research played a key role in shaping the Second Vatican Council.

Early life and ordination

Henri de Lubac was born in Cambrai to an ancient noble family of the Ardèche. He was one of six children; his father was a banker and his mother a homemaker. The family returned in 1898 to the Lyon district, where Henri was schooled by Jesuits. A born aristocrat in manner and appearance, de Lubac studied law for a year before, aged 17, joining the Society of Jesus in Lyon on 9 October 1913. Owing to the political climate in France at the time as a result of the French anti-church laws of the early twentieth century, the Jesuit novitiate had temporarily relocated to St Leonards-on-Sea, East Sussex, where de Lubac studied before being drafted to the French army in 1914 due to the outbreak of the Great War. He received a head wound at Les Éparges on All Saints Day, 1917, which would give him recurring episodes of dizziness and headaches for the rest of his life. Following demobilisation in 1919, de Lubac returned to the Jesuits and continued his philosophical studies, first at Hales Place in Canterbury and then, from 1920 to 1923, at the Maison Saint-Louis, the Jesuit philosophate located at that time in St. Helier, Jersey. It was here that he would encounter the thought of Maurice Blondel and Pierre Rousselot. The encounter with Blondel would prove especially important. In 1932, de Lubac would eventually write to Blondel and tell him of his encounter with L'Action in the early 1920s, and how Blondel's thought around the problem of integralism became one of the central instigators of de Lubac's search for a renewed understanding of the relationship between nature and grace. De Lubac taught at the Jesuit College at Mongré, in the Rhône, from 1923 to 1924, and then in 1924 returned to England and began his four years of theological studies at Ore Place in Hastings, East Sussex. In 1926, the Jesuit college was relocated back to Fourvière in Lyons, where de Lubac completed the remaining two years of his theological studies. He was ordained to the priesthood on 22 August 1927.

Professor and theologian

In 1929, de Lubac was appointed professor of fundamental theology at the Catholic University of Lyon (the required doctorate having been conferred by the Gregorian University in Rome at the behest of the Father General of the Society of Jesus, without de Lubac's setting foot there or ever submitting a dissertation). He would teach there from 1929 to 1961, though with two interruptions – first during World War II, when he was forced underground because of his activities with the French Resistance, and then from 1950 to 1958, when the Society of Jesus, under pressure from Rome, removed him from his teaching responsibilities and the Fourvière Jesuit residence.

During the 1930s de Lubac spent his time teaching at the Catholic University and researching, as well as teaching (between 1935 and 1940) one course at the Jesuit seminary at Fourvière (where he also lived from 1934 onwards). His first book, the now-classic Catholicisme (English title of the current edition: Catholicism: Christ and Common Destiny of Man) was published in 1938, before the war. In 1940, he founded the series Sources Chrétiennes ("Christian Sources"), co-edited with fellow Jesuit Jean Daniélou, a collection of bilingual, critical editions of early Christian texts and of the Church Fathers that has reinvigorated both the study of patristics and the doctrine of Sacred Tradition.

During the Second World War, the first interruption to this pattern came: de Lubac joined a movement of "spiritual resistance," assisting in the publication of an underground journal of Nazi resistance called Témoignage chrétien, or Christian Testimony. It was intended to show the incompatibility of Christian belief with the philosophy and activities of the Nazi regime, both in Germany and also under the cover of the Vichy government in southern France, which was theoretically independent of the Reich. De Lubac was often in hiding from the Germans and several of his co-workers on the journal were captured and executed. Even in hiding, he continued to study and write.

From 1944 onwards, with the end of the Nazi occupation of France, de Lubac came out of hiding and published a number of texts (many of them begun or completed before the war but not published in the early 1940s because of the shortage of paper) which became major interventions in twentieth-century Catholic theology. These included: Corpus Mysticum, which had been ready for publication in 1939, and appeared in February 1944; Le Drame de l'humanisme athée, (The Drama of Atheist Humanism) published in December 1944; De la connaissance de Dieu published in 1945; Surnaturel: Études historiques (a book which de Lubac had started at Hastings in his student days), published in 1946 in a print run of 700 copies, because of the ongoing paper shortage.