Surnaturel

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Surnaturel is a book by the Catholic theologian Henri de Lubac. It is one of his best‑known and most debated works. The book looks at how people have understood the word “supernatural” and how that idea has changed over time. In the Middle Ages, the main contrast was between natural and moral; later, people began to talk about natural and supernatural. De Lubac tries to explain what Thomas Aquinas really meant.

He began thinking about these ideas as a student in Hastings and published several articles in the 1930s that became much of Surnaturel. World War II slowed the project. In 1940 he fled Lyon with his notebook, and in 1943 he fled Nazi danger again to Vals, where he kept working and used the local library. By 1941–42 the book was shaping up, but paper shortages stopped its publication. It finally appeared in 1946 in a very small run of 700 copies.

The main question of Surnaturel is how human beings, who are created in natural life, can be directed toward the order of grace without already possessing grace and without earning it. De Lubac argues that, in the early Fathers and medieval scholastics, there was a single view: humanity’s end was supernatural, not merely natural. This unified view began to unravel with thinkers like Denys the Carthusian and, more importantly, Cajetan. Denys spoke of a natural end that needed a supernatural add-on, while Cajetan, presenting himself as commenting on Aquinas, introduced the idea of human nature as a “closed and sufficient whole.” The later idea of a “pure nature” grew stronger through people like Baius and Jansenius, who suggested that human nature might be complete in itself. This made the supernatural seem optional and helped separate nature from the supernatural, which De Lubac saw as harmful.

Surnaturel sparked sharp controversies and was linked with Nouvelle théologie. In 1950 the Jesuit leadership told De Lubac to stop teaching and ordered three of his books removed from libraries, with many people linking his views to the papal encyclical Humani Generis. He was largely sidelined for about a decade. But in the 1960s his ideas gained wider acceptance, and he was asked by Pope John XXIII to help with Vatican II. In 1965 he published Le Mystere du surnaturel and Augustinisme et théologie moderne to address objections and expand the work.