Henri De Lubac Quotes

Nietzsche, in cursing our age, sees in it the heritage of the Gospel, while Dostoevsky, cursing it just as vigorously, sees in it the result of a denial of the Gospel

Habit and routine have an unbelievable power to waste and destroy

Henri de Lubac, one of the most outstanding Roman Catholic theologians of the twentieth century, put it with a clarity and brevity very hard to improve upon: ‘It is not sincerity, it is truth which frees us… To seek sincerity above all things is perhaps, at bottom, not to want to be transformed.

It is not very easy to see,” Mircea Eliade writes, “how the discovery that the primal laws of geometry were due to the empirical necessities of the irrigation of the Nile Delta can have any bearing on the validity or otherwise of those laws.” We can argue here in the same way. For it is really no easier to understand how the fact that the first emergence of the idea of God may possibly have been provoked by a particular spectacle, or have been linked to a particular experience of a sensible nature, could affect the validity of the idea itself. In each case the problem of its birth from experience and the problem of its essence or validity are distinct. The problems of surveying no more engendered geometry than the experience of storm and sky engendered the idea of God. He important thing is to consider the idea in itself; not the occasion of its birth, but its inner constitution. If the idea of God in the mind of man is real, then no fact accessible to history or psychology or sociology, or to any other scientific discipline, can really be its generating cause.

Me señala una estantería repleta de libros dispuestos con orden, pero no de un modo sistemático. Imagino que son los libros a los que regresa de vez en cuando. «Debo de tenerlo por aquí», señala. «¿Lo encontrás?», me pregunta pidiéndome ayuda. Es una estantería de cuatro o cinco baldas. En la parte baja, veo entre otros libros la Eneida, de Virgilio, El divino impaciente, de José María Pemán, las Poesías, de Friedrich Hölderlin, las Meditaciones sobre la Iglesia, de Henri De Lubac... También obras de san Agustín, Borges, Dostoievski.

We have read as many texts as possible.

The series was known as Sources chrétiennes. It had begun in Lyons in dire times—in 1942. Under the direction of Cardinal Jean Daniélou, Henri de Lubac (1896–1983), and Claude Mondésert (1906–1990), and with the warm encouragement of Henri-Irénée Marrou (who edited the Paidagôgos of Clement of Alexandria for the series), the Sources chrétiennes became both the symbol and the spearhead of the movement of ressourcement—of a return to the sources. Though we two came at it from very different angles, Foucault and I were the beneficiaries of that remarkable moment in French Catholic scholarship.

Ahora se encontraba al frente de treinta y seis mil treinta y ocho hombres, en un momento crucial en que ya comenzaban a sentirse los envites de la crisis: el estallido de la modernidad, los primeros brotes de la secularización, el decrecimiento de vocaciones, la era del aggiornamento. En todo el mundo habían sonado en años anteriores nombres de jesuitas, que habían explorado profundamente la vida interior de la Iglesia, como Émile Mersh, Sebastian Tromp y Henri de Lubac. Filósofos y teólogos como Maréchal, Rousselot, Scheuer, Rahner, Lonergan, Daniélou, Mondésert, Jungmann… Se vivía entonces la explosiva influencia de los estudios científicos, el desarrollo de la energía nuclear y la exploración del espacio exterior, creando una inquietud y un ansia intelectual que el jesuita francés Pierre Teilhard de Chardin calificó como temor de que el hombre hubiera perdido todo significado, y que se encontrase desorientado en una esquina donde no hay escape.

Of course there was no need for the Church to repudiate the harmony between the earth and the cosmos. Just as her doctors have preserved, often felicitously, many habits of thought and turns of phrase which are tainted in origin, so does the Church gather to her vast treasury riches rescued from all sides. She took the sumptuous setting of her worship from dying paganism, making a halo for the Sun of Justice out of the glory of the Sol Invictus, adorning her cathedrals with the signs of the zodiac, harmonizing her ceremonies with the rhythm of the seasons. But it is neither the natural cycle nor some extra-cosmic deliverance that is portrayed by her liturgical year: it is the vast history of our redemption.