When Gustavo Gutiérrez, O.P. passed away last month (October 22, 2024), Pope Francis sent a video message to be played at his funeral Mass which was livestreamed from Gutiérrez’s home country of Peru. Gutiérrez, a mestizo priest who spent most of his life pastoring a poor parish in the slums of Lima, had in life earned the title “father of liberation theology” for the critical role he played in developing Latin American Liberation Theology. At his death, Pope Francis would add another title: “a great man, a man of the Church.” Gutiérrez’s scholarly work clearly had a global reach. But what, exactly, does this Latin American theologian have to do with European studies? That story begins in 1955 when Gutiérrez traveled to Europe to undertake theology and philosophy studies in preparation for his ordination to the priesthood. Many years later, at his doctoral defense at the University of Lyon in France, he spoke warmly about the intellectual debt he owed to European theology. He named Henri de Lubac, Maurice Blondel, and Karl Rahner as scholars from whose ideas he “derived great profit” and many more European figures were cited in the same spirit throughout the proceedings. It is clear from the transcript of the defense as well as from his many published writings that his ideas were forged in dialogue with the thinkers he came to know during his studies in Belgium, France, and Rome. So: Where and how in Gutiérrez’s work do we see the influence of his European interlocutors? In this short articl,e I focus on Gutiérrez’s reception of French Jesuit Henri de Lubac’s theology of nature and grace.

When Gutiérrez arrived at Lyon, de Lubac was not teaching theology in an official capacity. His Jesuit superiors had removed him from his teaching post in 1950 after his bookSurnaturel came under scrutiny from the Magisterium, which accused it of being a “new” (read“unorthodox”) theology. After returning to the university in 1953, de Lubac was only permitted to instruct courses in non-theological topics, but he met with theology students informally. Gutiérrez would later recall the lively discussions he had with the professor about theological questions of the day. Perhaps the most pressing question at that time was the one de Lubac had confronted head on in his controversial book: What is the relationship between nature and grace?

Catholic theologians were quite fond then of the theory of “pure nature,” a term that refers to a hypothetical situation in which human nature possesses a desire only for natural happiness and is fully capable of obtaining that happiness by its own powers. These “pure nature” theologians did not deny that God had in fact given to the human creature a supernatural destiny, but they conceived of it as something added to nature after the fact. They thought this anthropology was necessary to protect the gratuitousness of grace, because if we start out with a creature whose fulfillment lies in a supernatural end (that is, supernatural beatitude, or vision of God), which it is incapable of reaching on its own, then God seems to owe it to the creature thus created to fulfill that end. But in de Lubac’s view, the theory leads to a serious problem, which is that it creates a duality between nature and grace. If a human creature exists such that her happiness is wholly enclosed within herself, the supernatural becomes superfluous, like icing layered over the top of a cake—something very nice indeed, but ultimately unnecessary, because the cake isalready quite good on its own.

De Lubac’s concern about pure nature theory was not solely academic. He was worried, in the first place, by how this duality had seeped into the consciousness of Christians of his day, leading to a situation in which the practice of one’s faith was comfortably separate from everyday life. It was precisely this kind of compartmentalization of faith and lived experience, he thought, that accounted for the widespread support among Catholics of the Vichy Regime in his native France—a regime that acquiesced to the antisemitic policies of Nazi Germany. In his view, course correction to Europe’s dangerous political trajectory required course correction to its theology: theologians had to find a different way of talking about the relationship between nature and the supernatural, a way that would eliminate all duality between the two. De Lubac devoted himself to this task, publishing numerous texts in which he argued "pure nature" does not and has never existed; the human being is from the beginning a spiritual creature, possessing a natural desire for a supernatural end. Concretely and historically, grace is intrinsic to nature, permeating it from within from the first moment of creation. De Lubac showed, furthermore, that this united view of nature and the supernatural is the one that consistently characterizes theological anthropology from Christianity’s earliest textual sources, which means that not only is pure nature a fiction, it is also an aberration in the theological tradition.

De Lubac’s contribution to the grace-nature debates eventually received broad acceptance in Catholic theology, as evidenced by its incorporation into the central texts of the Second Vatican Council. Today his ideas are “in the water” so to speak, of the Catholic theological imagination. But their implementation into the theological and practical life of the Church did not everywhere look the same. When Gutiérrez returned to Peru after his studies, he brought de Lubac’s insight about the unity of nature and grace into a critical dialogue with the historical reality on the Latin American continent, asking: What does grace’s intrinsic relation to nature have to do with the fact of widespread and debilitating poverty and injustice? Another way of saying that grace and nature are intrinsically related is to say that God is always offering the gift of Godself to the world. If this is the case, Gutiérrez reasoned, then salvation is not something only found in the “next life”—it is here and now penetrating history and our everyday experience. The ever-present invitation to the human being to cooperate with this gift of grace is, in a basic sense, an invitation to participate in God’s salvific work within time. Gutiérrez understood that to reject dualities between nature and grace is likewise to reject dualities between secular history and salvation history. There is only one history: the one permeated by God’s gratuitous self-gift. Integral liberation is no less than salvation’s beginning in history. At its most fundamental level, it is liberation from sin, but it also encompasses historical transformation at the levels of personal and political experience. This is why, while affirming that salvation is wholly the work of God and only fully realized beyond time, Gutiérrez also insists that it is our work—the work of freely responding to God’s grace in order to build up the Kingdom of God here and now. Starting with de Lubac’s insight that human existence is always already supernaturally summoned existence, Gutiérrez turned to the theme of history and transposed the nature-grace paradigm into a liberation-salvation paradigm. The result is a critically articulated liberation theology of grace, rooted in the intellectual legacy of European theology but also genuinely new.

Suggested Further Reading

Lubac, Henri de. The Mystery of the Supernatural. New York: Crossroad Pub., 1998.

Grumett, David. “De Lubac, Grace, and the Pure Nature Debate.” Modern Theology 31, no. 1(2015): 123–46.

Gutiérrez, Gustavo. A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1988.

Shortall, Sarah. Soldiers of God in a Secular World: Catholic Theology and Twentieth-Century French Politics. 1st ed. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2021.

About the author

Kelly Rich Klee is a Ph.D. candidate in systematic theology at the University of Notre Dame. She obtained a B.A. in theology from the University of Notre Dame and a Master of Arts in religion from Yale Divinity School. Her research explores the European intellectual roots of Gustavo Gutiérrez’s liberation theology.

Originally published by Kelly Klee at eitw.nd.edu on December 04, 2024.