Abstract
This article demonstrates the overlooked similarity between Scheeben’s and Rahner’s accounts of God’s self-communication to the human person through uncreated grace. It then argues that though Scheeben’s conception of God’s universal offer of grace evinces similarities with Rahner’s “supernatural existential,” Scheeben differs from Rahner by emphasizing the distinction between nature and grace. This study can help theologians to better situate Scheeben’s theology amid its current renaissance and to reappropriate Rahner’s basic insight about divine self-communication.
Keywords
In the mid-twentieth century, Matthias Joseph Scheeben (1835–88) garnered effusive praise from diverse quarters. 1 Hans Urs von Balthasar called him “the greatest German theologian to-date since the time of Romanticism.” 2 Marie-Dominique Chenu dedicated his programmatic essay “Position de la théologie” to Scheeben, whom he celebrated for heralding “the end of ‘baroque’ theology.” 3 Pope Pius XI lauded Scheeben as “a man of genius,” “a model of theology,” and “a model of saintly Christian life.” 4 Dorothy Day, reading the Rhenish theologian from the slums of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, described Scheeben as a “great theologian,” to whose “glowing and beautiful words . . . my heart and mind give ready assent.” 5 Given this adulation, it is unsurprising that, after a period of relative neglect, Scheeben’s theology is enjoying a renaissance. Contemporary theologians are studying Scheeben not as a mere historical figure, but as a living source who can contribute to theology today in areas such as method, 6 soteriology, 7 ecclesiology, 8 sacramental theology, 9 and, above all, the theology of grace. 10
Amid this renewal of interest in Scheeben, an idea has emerged that his theology can play a reconciling function in disputes between contemporary Thomists and the intellectual heirs of the Communio theologians Hans Urs von Balthasar and Henri de Lubac. Aidan Nichols, for example, observes that both Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange and Balthasar sympathetically cite Scheeben, which Nichols takes as evidence of Scheeben’s “mediating role.” 11 Edward Oakes suggests that Scheeben’s theology can reconcile Lubacians and Thomists over the disputed question of nature and grace, a claim further developed by Andrew Dean Swafford. 12 Largely absent from current Scheeben scholarship (particularly among anglophone theologians) is discussion of how his theology relates to that of another monumental twentieth-century theologian, who does not fit easily within the Communio or Thomist camps: Karl Rahner. 13
Thomas Joseph White’s foreword to the new English translation of Scheeben’s Soteriology: The Work of Christ the Redeemer and the Role of His Virgin Mother is an exception. 14 White presents Scheeben and Rahner as belonging to a “common modern German Catholic theological tradition” on account of their shared Scholasticism. Yet White says that Scheeben and Rahner loom within this tradition as “specifically contrary figures” and “polar opposites.” Scheeben and Rahner both develop a christocentric theology concerned with deification and grace, but they do so in “radically contrasting” ways: Rahner levels Christology into “a generalized anthropology of the ‘supernatural-existential,’” whereas Scheeben retains a “high account” of Christ’s knowledge, priesthood, and salvific role. 15
Although this contrast is accurate on some points, the overall image White presents of the relation between the two German theologians is incomplete and, therefore, misleading. For Karl Rahner—perhaps more than any other major twentieth-century Catholic theologian—carried forward the most distinctive aspects of Scheeben’s theology of grace. Though this claim might be surprising to contemporary theologians accustomed to thinking of Scheeben as something of a nineteenth-century Thomist-Communio hybrid, a previous generation of scholars (especially those of the deutscher Sprachraum) noticed the resemblance between Scheeben and Rahner. Two particular similarities were pointed out. First, Eugen Paul, Leo Scheffczyk, Wolfgang Müller, and Hans Gasper noted a likeness between Scheeben and Rahner on the nature-grace relation, which, in the opinion of the last three, extends to Rahner’s “supernatural existential.” 16 Second, Josef Höfer, Norbert Hoffmann, Karl-Heinz Minz, Müller, Giuseppe Tanzella-Nitti, and Christoph Binninger identified similarities between Scheeben’s and Rahner’s accounts of God’s self-communication to the human person through uncreated grace. 17 These points of likeness between Scheeben and Rahner have been overlooked by contemporary scholars. Moreover, with the exception of Scheffczyk’s investigation of anticipatory notes of Rahner’s supernatural existential in Scheeben, the likeness between Scheeben’s and Rahner’s theologies of grace has only been mentioned in passing and has never been analyzed in detail. This is especially the case with the interconnected issues at the core of both their accounts of human union with God: the priority of uncreated grace, God’s self-communication, divine formal causality, and non-appropriated relations between the human person and the three Divine Persons.
My aim in this article is threefold. First, I wish to demonstrate the substantial agreement between Scheeben’s and Rahner’s accounts of human union with God. Second, I seek to identify the similarities and differences between Scheeben’s theology of grace and Rahner’s supernatural existential. Third, I want to suggest that noting the resemblance between Scheeben and Rahner can help contemporary theologians, on the one hand, to avoid oversimplified narratives about Scheeben’s theology amid its current renaissance and, on the other, to repropose Rahner’s fundamental insight about grace as God’s self-communication in a way amenable to those wary of the supernatural existential.
Rahner on God’s Self-Communication as Uncreated Grace
In the seminal 1939 article “Zur scholastischen Begrifflichkeit der ungeschaffenen Gnade” (“Some Implications of the Scholastic Concept of Uncreated Grace”), Rahner introduced several major leitmotifs that would redound throughout his mature work: the priority of uncreated grace over created grace; grace understood as God’s self-communication to the human person articulated as a type of divine formal causality; and the existence of proper (i.e., non-appropriated) relations between the graced human person and the three Divine Persons. 18 Rahner begins the article with the assertion that Scripture and the Fathers affirmed the priority of uncreated grace over created grace, but that this order was inverted in Scholasticism. 19 By this Rahner means that Scripture and the Fathers understood “created grace as a consequence of God’s communication of himself,” whereas Scholastic theories conceived of “created grace as the basis of this communication.” 20 Rahner seeks to restore the scriptural-patristic order using resources already present within Scholasticism.
He finds them in Scholastic accounts of the beatific vision. Through an analysis of Thomas Aquinas’s claim that, in the beatific vision, the divine essence takes the place of a created species in the intellect, Rahner concludes that the relationship with God enjoyed by the blessed cannot be understood within the category of divine efficient causality, but rather involves divine formal causality, because God gives to the blessed not just the created gift of the light of glory but also the uncreated gift of God’s very self. 21 Because glory is the flowering of grace, Rahner argues that the ontology of the immediate vision of God enjoyed by the blessed can be applied to the ontology of grace, asserting that the uncreated grace given to the wayfarer is also an instance of divine formal causality. 22 Rahner names this “quasi-formal causality.” The prefix “quasi-” is added to remind us of three things: first, this type of causality is known only through divine revelation and through analogical concepts; second, God’s activity has a meta-categorical and transcendent character; and third, divine formal causality does not perfect the human person tout court but only in her spiritual faculties. 23 Quasi-formal causality, Rahner explains, restores the correct order between created and uncreated grace: God’s self-communication to the creature as uncreated grace is prior to created grace, just as a form is prior to its ultimate material disposition. 24 Although Rahner builds his account principally from the beatific vision, he also states that the formal causality present in Scholastic accounts of Christ’s hypostatic union can be applied, mutatis mutandis, to the graced human person. He claims that the three “strictly supernatural realities”—the hypostatic union, glory, and grace—all entail a divine-human relationship based on formal, rather than efficient, causality. 25 Finally, Rahner notes that his account of quasi-formal causality allows us to conceive of the graced human person’s relation to the three Divine Persons in terms other than appropriation without violating the principle that in all God’s acts ad extra, the Divine Persons operate as a single efficient cause. He thought such an articulation was needed in order to rescue the church from the “pre-Christian monotheism” that he believed had infected wide swaths of Catholic piety. 26
The ideas Rahner initially sketched in this 1939 article remained the bedrock of his thinking on human-divine union throughout his long career. Several examples will serve to demonstrate this point. Prompted by Pope Pius XII’s statement in the 1947 encyclical Mystici Corporis that the topic of divine indwelling contains open questions, Rahner returned to the issue in his 1957 essay “Natur und Gnade” (“Nature and Grace”). 27 Restating themes he had proposed nearly twenty years earlier, Rahner underscores the priority of uncreated grace, presents grace and glory as two moments in a single process of deification, describes God’s self-communication as a quasi-formal cause, and proposes non-appropriated relations between the human person and the Divine Persons. In the 1960s, Rahner repeated these arguments in his entries on revelation and divine self-communication in Sacramentum Mundi and the Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche. 28
All these points reappear in Rahner’s 1976 Foundations of Christian Faith (Grundkurs des Glaubens). 29 Here, in Rahner’s mature work, the concept of God’s self-communication assumes an ever-greater prominence and forms the backbone of his narration of the Christian faith; as he puts it, God’s self-communication to the human person is “what the Christian message is really all about” (das Eigentliche der christlichen Botschaft). 30 By “self-communication” (Selbstmitteilung), Rahner explains, he does not mean that God says something “about” himself; rather, “what is communicated [das Mitgeteilte] is really God in his own being [Sein].” 31 The giver gives himself as gift so that the human person might immediately know and love God. 32 Though this is an “ontological [seinshafte] self-communication,” it should not be understood in an “objectified and reified sense” (gegenständlich-sachhaften Sinn) but instead in a personal sense: “a self-communication of God as personal absolute mystery . . . to man as a spiritual and personal being [Wesen].” 33 In Foundations—nearly forty years after his early article on uncreated grace and well after Scholasticism had been displaced as the dominant theological idiom—Rahner continued to use the concept of divine formal causality to articulate God’s self-communication to the human person. 34
Scheeben’s Likeness to Rahner
Rahner’s thinking about God’s self-communication to the human person through uncreated grace as a divine formal cause did not emerge out of a vacuum. In his 1939 article, Rahner listed Scheeben among those theologians who had previously offered hints of his theory, but he did not consider in detail the substantial agreement of their theologies. 35 I will demonstrate this concurrence by presenting six interconnected points of Scheeben’s theology of grace that exhibit a striking similarity to Rahner: the aim of recovering the teaching of the Greek Fathers and synthesizing it with Latin Scholasticism; the priority of uncreated grace; the use of the beatific vision and Christ’s hypostatic union as exemplars of human union with God through grace; the overarching theme of God’s self-communication; the concept of divine formal causality; and the proposal of non-appropriated relations between the human person and the three Divine Persons.
I begin with the first of these points. Inspired by the Jesuits under whom he studied at the Roman College, Scheeben dedicated himself throughout his career to re-sourcing what he regarded as the neglected teaching of the Church Fathers, particularly the Greek Fathers. 36 He believed their theology contained the best resources for combatting rationalism (represented by Georg Hermes [1775–1831], Anton Günther [1783–1863], and their disciples), Scheeben’s bête noire. 37 In his mature treatment of the relation between created and uncreated grace, Scheeben lays out what he calls “the Western, specifically scholastic” and “the Greek patristic” conceptions of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. 38 He says that the two views may appear, at first glance, to be completely opposed: Latin Scholasticism emphasizes created grace and divine efficient causality, whereas the Greek Fathers accent uncreated grace and divine formal causality. 39 Nevertheless, Scheeben believes he can demonstrate that these accounts complement and enlighten one another. 40 Scheeben’s presentation resembles Rahner’s inasmuch as both theologians argued that the Greek Fathers foregrounded uncreated grace and divine formal causality, and the Latin Scholastics created grace and divine efficient causality; moreover, both theologians sought to bring the Greek and Latin visions into harmony, rather than simply substituting the former for the latter.
Scheeben says that the main task for reconciling the Latin Scholastic and Greek patristic accounts of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit is to clarify the relation between created and uncreated grace. Scheeben’s account of this relation, and specifically his affirmation of the priority of uncreated grace, is a second similarity to Rahner. According to Scheeben, created and uncreated grace form two constitutive elements of a single organic process. The infusion of created grace into the soul (specifically gratia gratum faciens, i.e., sanctifying grace) justifies the human being through an intrinsic renewal and elevation of human nature. This prepares the soul to receive uncreated grace, which is the gift of God’s very self through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. 41 This may lead us to think that uncreated grace follows in the wake of created grace, but Scheeben explains that this is not the case. Rather, the communication of the Holy Spirit himself as uncreated grace is prior to the communication of created gifts like charity; Scheeben describes the former as the “root” of the latter. 42 The Holy Spirit (as uncreated grace) prepares the soul (through created grace) to be his own dwelling (once again, as uncreated grace).
A third likeness lies in the common method Scheeben and Rahner employ to present a theology of uncreated grace. Operative within Scheeben’s patristic-Scholastic synthesis is his methodological principle that insight into one theological mystery is gained by comparing it with other mysteries. 43 Like Rahner, Scheeben posits a tight, exemplary nexus between the human-divine unions found in grace, glory, and Christ’s hypostatic union. 44 Specifically, both authors construct their ontologies of grace by borrowing from the metaphysical blueprints of the beatific vision and the hypostatic union. This maneuver leads to their common conviction that grace involves the communication of God’s very self to the human person as an uncreated gift. Just as the blessed in patria know and love God immediately, so, too, Scheeben thinks, the supernatural knowledge and love of the graced human person in via has as its “most proper object God himself, as he is in himself [wie er in sich ist]” inasmuch as “the divine essence [Wesenheit] in itself is offered for our living possession and enjoyment.” 45 Furthermore, just as the created grace of union joins Christ’s human and divine natures, so, too, Scheeben says, created sanctifying grace is the bond connecting the human person to the person of the Holy Spirit as uncreated grace. 46
This takes us to a fourth similarity between Scheeben and Rahner: both think of grace as God’s self-communication to the human person. It has been argued that Scheeben differs from Rahner inasmuch as he wishes to exclude “the idea of a self-communication of God as a formally intrinsic, ontological-objective act.”
47
In response to this claim, it is important to observe that Scheeben repeatedly uses the phrase “God’s self-communication” (Selbstmitteilung Gottes) to describe God’s gift to the creature.
48
Furthermore, the idea of the communication of the divinity is an overarching theme in Scheeben. The following lines take us to the heart of his theology: If the internal divine relations and processes [Vorgänge] are externally imitated and reproduced by the communication of the divine nature to rational creatures . . . [then] the Trinity is clearly the basis for the possibility, as well as the exemplar and goal, of the supernatural order of grace among creatures. The very essence [innerste Wesen] of the Trinity consists in the substantial communication of the divine nature to other persons. Hence the true meaning of the Trinity must consist in the fact that on its basis, according to its model, and for its glorification, a grace-filled communication of the participation in the divine happens ad extra, and that the Trinity consequently forms the root for the order of things called forth through this communication, out of which it arises.
49
Three key elements of Scheeben’s theology are here contained in a nutshell. First, the idea of divine communication predominates in his doctrine of God: he conceives of the Trinity as a linear communication of the divine substance from the Father through the Son to the Holy Spirit. Second, for Scheeben, divine supernatural activity ad extra is a “prolongation and continuation” (Ausdehnung und Fortführung) and an “imitation and reproduction” (Nachahmung und Reproduktion) of the intra-divine life of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. 50 Third, therefore, the eternal processions and the temporal missions of the Son and the Holy Spirit all are instances of the communication of the divinity. 51 In short, the idea of God’s self-communication is a leitmotif of Scheeben’s theology as it is of Rahner’s, one which spans the inner life of God and divine activity in the world. 52
Scheeben describes God’s self-communication to the human person as a type of formal causality—a fifth characteristic he shares with Rahner. Scheeben develops this idea by applying the patterns of the beatific vision and Christ’s hypostatic union to grace. He examines the same passages of Aquinas that Rahner would later consider, and, like Rahner, explains that Aquinas’s theology of the beatific vision involves a type of formal causality. Scheeben describes this as “the sinking-in [Einsenkung] of the divine substance into the mind’s eye [geistige Auge] of the blessed, in order to fructify this eye by its very self as a quasi-intelligible form [als forma intelligibilis gleichsam].” 53 Scheeben also conceives of Christ’s hypostatic union as an instance of formal causality, what he describes as “an information or formation of the humanity by the Word” (eine informatio oder formatio humanitatis per Verbum). 54 So, too, Scheeben continues, God’s communication to the creature through grace is an information akin to the soul’s information of the body. From his battles with nineteenth-century rationalists, Scheeben was keenly sensitive to the dangers of a pantheistic abrogation of the God-world distinction, and so he explains that this is not information “in the strict sense by inherence and confusion into one nature” (per inhaerentiam et confusionem in unam naturam) but “by coherence and passing into or indwelling” (per cohaerentiam et immeationem oder inhabitationem), which occurs when a lower substance is “adorned and crowned, fulfilled and impregnated” by a higher substance. 55
Wishing to distance Scheeben from Rahner, Tanzella-Nitti points out that Scheeben never uses the term “quasi-formal causality” (causalità quasi-formale). 56 Nichols similarly says that Scheeben differs from Rahner because the latter introduces “the innovative notion of ‘quasi-formal’ cause for Uncreated Grace.” 57 It is true, strictly speaking, that Scheeben (as far as I am aware) never uses the exact phrase “quasi-formal causality.” But he comes very close. Scheeben says that God acts through grace as a formal cause, routinely using both the Latin causa formalis and the German Formalursache (as well as Formalgrund and Formalprinzip). 58 Moreover, he says that, in the case of grace, “formal cause” must have a broader meaning than it usually carries in philosophy and theology. Just like Rahner, Scheeben expresses this broader meaning through the adjectival “quasi-,” calling the conferral of uncreated grace a “quasi-information” (Quasiinformation). 59 On other occasions, Scheeben will qualify formal causality with German words such as “gleichsam,” “gewissermaßen,” and “in gewissem Sinne,” which approximate the meaning of “quasi-.” 60 Scheeben’s contemporary Theodor Granderath accused Scheeben of violating the Council of Trent’s teaching that the only formal cause of justification is created grace (the same charge William Hill levelled against Rahner a century later). 61 This sparked a drawn-out controversy between the theologians, during the course of which Scheeben said that the idea that the Holy Spirit is not only an efficient and exemplary cause, but also a formal cause “of our supernatural being [Sein]” is “the core of my teaching.” 62
As we saw above, Rahner believed that divine quasi-formal causality opens up the possibility to conceive of proper—that is, non-appropriated—relations between the human person and the three Divine Persons. He named Scheeben as a forerunner of this idea. 63 The argument, which is essentially the same for Scheeben and Rahner, proceeds as follows: 64 When God bestows created supernatural gifts, he acts as an efficient cause. When God acts as an efficient cause, the principle of this action is the divine nature, which is common to all three Divine Persons. At the level of efficient causality, therefore, divine activity cannot be hypostatically proper, but is necessarily common. Its trinitarian character comes about only through appropriation—that is, attributing to one Divine Person an action that is really common to all three (e.g., attributing creation to the Father). The unity of divine activity in creation is expressed in the axiom opera trinitatis ad extra sunt indivisa. 65 The importance of the axiom is easy to see: if the individual Divine Persons were understood to be acting as individual efficient causes in the created order, trinitarian theism would slide into tritheism; there would no longer be three Divine Persons, but three gods. However, if through uncreated grace God communicates himself to the creature as a quasi-formal cause, the creature enters into a relation with God not founded exclusively on divine efficient causality. Instead, in receiving uncreated grace, the creature knows and loves God as he is in himself and therefore enjoys relations with the Divine Persons in their hypostatic distinctness. It is important to note that Scheeben did not think that the human person is united through grace exclusively to the Holy Spirit like Christ’s human nature is united exclusively to the Son (a theory that had been proposed by Dionysius Petavius [1583–1652], and more recently, by David Coffey). 66 Instead, Scheeben thought that all three Divine Persons dwelt in the human person with their personal character—what can be called a proper, nonexclusive divine indwelling. 67
The Supernatural Existential and the Divergence between Scheeben and Rahner
In Rahner’s mature work, he developed the points he held in common with Scheeben in close association with his concept of the supernatural existential. Thus, we must consider where Scheeben’s theology stands vis-à-vis Rahner’s famous theorem. Rahner introduced the supernatural existential amid the mid-twentieth-century nature-grace debates, as he sought to stake out a position between that of the neo-Scholastics (against whom Rahner leveled the charge of extrinsicism) and the position now associated with de Lubac (which Rahner thought threatens the gratuity of grace). 68 The German Jesuit argued that to be a human being is to be a created spirit always open to the self-communication of God. The human intellect is dynamically ordered toward the infinite in such a way that there is an a priori “preapprehension” (Vorgriff) of absolute being in all apprehensions of finite being. This preapprehension is the condition that renders knowledge of finite objects possible, as they are profiled against the horizon of the absolute. 69 Yet this orientation cannot be considered an ordering to the formal supernatural end of the beatific vision. 70 Rahner argues, rather, that the human capacity to receive the love that God is—a capacity that is the central and abiding existential of humanity—must be unexacted and “supernatural,” because only if this capacity is unexacted does grace remain unexacted. Rahner calls this capacity the “supernatural existential” (übernatürliche Existential). The supernatural existential is the necessary condition for the acceptance of the gift of God’s self-communication, and yet, at the same time, this self-communication of God is already present inchoately in the supernatural existential and in the dynamism of the human spirit’s transcendental movement. 71 In light of the supernatural existential, nature, in a theological sense, may be seen as a “remainder concept” (Restbegriff), that which remains over and against the supernatural existential when the latter is subtracted. Rahner notes, however, that this distinction cannot be stated with neat precision because human beings never find themselves in a state apart from the supernatural existential. 72 This last point is crucial for Rahner: the supernatural existential “is present in all men as an existential [Existential] of their concrete existence [Dasein].” 73
Scholars have voiced conflicting opinions about the relation of Scheeben’s theology to Rahner’s supernatural existential. In a 1970 study, Paul suggested that Scheeben’s idea that human nature is always ordered and called to grace had been a precursor of Rahner’s supernatural existential. 74 In a paper delivered at a 1988 conference commemorating the centenary of Scheeben’s death, Scheffczyk briefly noted what Richard Schenk describes as “the bothersome appearance of too close an affinity of [Scheeben’s mature] position to the supernatural existential of Karl Rahner.” 75 Scheffczyk analyzed this semblance in more detail in a second 1988 article, in which he distinguished Scheeben and Rahner more sharply, contrasting Rahner’s “transcendental” theology with Scheeben’s “organic” theology. 76 In a 1994 monograph, Müller claimed that Rahner’s theology fulfilled a desideratum of Scheeben by providing a philosophical approach “to the transcendental nature-grace unity.” 77 In a 2020 book, Gasper quotes a passage from Scheeben about the supernatural ordering of human moral action in concreto and then states baldly, “This, in essence, is what Rahner calls the supernatural existential.” 78 Others, like White and Joseph Ratzinger, interpret Scheeben’s theology as contrasting with—and in Ratzinger’s case, offering a corrective to—Rahner’s supernatural existential. 79
A thorough analysis of this issue would require a comprehensive presentation of Scheeben’s extensive theology of nature and grace, which I cannot offer here. The issue is further complicated by two ambiguities in Rahner: first, the relation between the supernatural existential and the human subject’s natural dynamism and preapprehension of God; second, the relation between the supernatural existential and grace. 80 Nevertheless, several observations can be made. The similarity between Scheeben’s theology of grace and Rahner’s supernatural existential is located in Scheeben’s conviction that all human beings exist within what he calls “the current supernatural world-order” (in der gegenwärtigen, übernatürlichen Weltordnung). 81 Scheeben, like Rahner, rejects the position (later associated with de Lubac) that human nature is intrinsically ordered to a supernatural end. But Scheeben, again like Rahner, stresses that, in the current economy, God has called all human persons to a supernatural end and sends supernatural grace into the hearts of all, even those outside the visible bounds of the church. 82 Scheeben imprints the idea with a Christic stamp, stating (in anticipation of Gaudium et Spes, §22) that God has united himself to the whole human race through the Incarnation; he describes the Incarnation as a higher order in which the orders of nature and grace are taken up. 83 Therefore, human moral acts within the current economy cannot be neatly divided into those with a merely natural vs. supernatural import. Instead, all human activity—and even certain institutions that in themselves have only a natural aim, such as the state and marriage—has a supernatural significance. 84 These elements of Scheeben’s theology lend support to the arguments of those who see in it a supernatural existential avant la lettre.
Nevertheless, critical differences remain. In general, the theological momentum of Rahner’s supernatural existential moves toward articulating a universal, transcendental human experience of God (which includes that of non-, or “anonymous,” Christians), 85 whereas the momentum of Scheeben’s theology goes in the opposite direction, toward an emphasis on how the reception of grace through an encounter with Christ and the Spirit categorically mediated by the church and her sacraments elevates the human person into a new and higher state of life. Rahner was concerned about a two-tiered, extrinsicist neo-Scholastic model of nature and grace, and so he highlighted the intrinsic connection of nature to grace through his transcendental analysis of the human person as a “hearer of the word” ordered through her spiritual faculties to God as the infinite horizon of being. 86 Scheeben, in contrast, was troubled by nineteenth-century rationalism’s tendency to level the distinction between nature and grace in a such a way that the supernatural dimension of Christianity was eviscerated and the Christian life was recast as a secular humanist project. 87 This prompted Scheeben to emphasize the initial distinction between the orders of nature and grace in their essential constitutions—not because he wished to carve out space for detailed considerations of human nature treated in abstraction from grace (whether for natural theology, natural law, etc.) but because he believed that the more one sees how grace surpasses nature, the more one will marvel at the glorious heights to which nature is elevated through its deifying union with grace. 88
Numerous other differences follow; here, I will mention three. First, even though Scheeben and Rahner propose similar ontologies of human-divine union focused on God’s self-gift as uncreated grace, they arrive at this meeting point through different approaches. As Scheffczyk has explained, Rahner approaches the nature-grace union “from below” through a “transcendental” theology based on the human spirit’s intrinsic dynamism; Scheeben proceeds “from above” and posits an “organic” conception of the union, underscoring that grace, revelation, and even creation itself are gifts descending from the trinitarian God. 89 Second, Rahner’s account of God’s self-communication is more apophatic than Scheeben’s: for Rahner, God communicates himself as “absolute mystery”; 90 for Scheeben, God communicates himself in the flesh of Jesus Christ and in the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. 91 Rahner by no means would deny this—after all, Christ is the “irreversible climax” of God’s self-communication for Rahner. 92 Nevertheless, the accent is different in the two theologians: Rahner’s transcendental approach points to a general, anthropological experience of standing before the horizon of the absolute mystery of God, whereas Scheeben’s presentation of God’s self-communication remains within the register of a classical theology of categorical revelation and the divine missions. 93 Third, although Scheeben affirms the universality of God’s salvific will and the corresponding means through a gift of grace that is given to all people, Scheeben does not suggest, as Rahner does, that God’s universal salvific will expresses itself in concreto as a permanent “existential” of human existence that is, as Rahner sometimes suggests, prior to human freedom. For Scheeben, there is a universal offer of grace in the sense that all human persons are offered saving grace, not universal in the sense that all human persons exist at all times in a graced (or, at minimum, “supernatural”) condition. Rahner, in contrast, denies that the offer of grace in the supernatural existential is “intermittent,” insisting that it is permanent and constant. 94 In sum, both those who see in Scheeben a forerunner to Rahner’s supernatural existential and those who present Scheeben’s theology of grace in contrast to Rahner’s theologoumenon have good reasons for their claims. Any comprehensive comparison between Scheeben and Rahner must admit both perspectives.
Contemporary Implications
The ongoing Scheeben renaissance shows no signs of abating—on the contrary, with the recent completion of the full English translation of Scheeben’s multivolume Handbuch der katholischen Dogmatik interest in Scheeben is likely to increase. My demonstration of Scheeben’s substantial agreement with Rahner on human union with God serves as a challenge, both to theologians sympathetic to Scheeben and to those who are not, to avoid oversimplified accounts of Scheeben’s theology and its contemporary and future relevance. One explanation for why Scheeben’s theology could serve as a common source for twentieth-century theologians as diverse as Garrigou-Lagrange, Balthasar, and Rahner was that Scheeben expressly aimed to stand outside the parameters of any particular school. 95 Scheeben was an immensely varied, subtle, and original thinker, and one should take pause before attempting to situate him too facilely in any “school” (however broadly we conceive of that term) of nineteenth-, twentieth-, or twenty-first-century theology. 96
Nevertheless, Scheeben’s theology of human-divine union places him in a distinct genealogical line that began in the seventeenth-century with Petavius, Louis Thomassin (1619–95), and Leonardus Lessius (1554–1623), 97 passed through the nineteenth-century Jesuit Roman School theologians Carlo Passaglia (1812–87) and Clemens Schrader (1820–75) 98 —and their brightest student, Scheeben—and was carried forth into the twentieth century by thinkers such as Maurice de la Taille and Rahner. 99 The individual theologians within this familial line held unique views and sometimes disagreed with each other, but their theologies of human union with God shared an overall shape marked by commitments to uncreated grace, divine formal causality, and non-appropriated relations to the Divine Persons. In these aspects, the paradigm they proposed represented an alternative to the mainstream of Latin Scholastic theology, which tended to emphasize created grace, divine efficient causality, and appropriated relations to the Divine Persons. By the middle of the twentieth century, the current to which Scheeben and Rahner belonged had gained such momentum that a controversy over the nature of divine indwelling erupted in Catholic theology. 100 The fact that recent studies of Scheeben have overlooked his similarity with Rahner is partially due to the fact that this larger controversy over divine indwelling receives little attention in the theology of grace today, whereas another grace controversy that raged at the same time—namely, the nature-grace dispute sparked by de Lubac’s Surnaturel—is once again of intense interest. 101 Scheeben scholarship reflects these trends: whereas now his nature-grace theology is of preeminent interest, a century ago, his theology of divine indwelling elicited more secondary study than any other topic in his corpus. 102
These same trends are reflected, albeit in a different way, in attitudes toward Rahner. It is perhaps surprising that, as we move into the middle of the twenty-first century, interest in the nineteenth-century Scheeben is increasing and interest in the twentieth-century Rahner is declining. Scholars sympathetic to Rahner have asked openly whether Rahnerian theology has a future. 103 The displacement of Rahner’s theology from the preeminent place it occupied for decades is due to a variety of factors, ranging from changes in theological formation (e.g., a decline in familiarity with the Scholastic theological idiom required to understand Rahner) to those of ecclesiastical politics (e.g., the promotion of Communio theologians under the papacies of Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI). A major factor, undoubtedly, has been the frequent criticism that Rahner’s transcendental theology in general and supernatural existential in particular reduce grace to a universal human experience and undermine the unique particularity of Christ’s work in the church and her sacraments. 104
Evaluating the accuracy of this criticism and whether Rahner has resources to rebuff it are not my present concerns. Rather, I wish to point out that many who hold this judgement of Rahner tend to dismiss his theology of grace wholesale. This, I suggest, is a mistake. For Rahner’s most important achievement in the theology of grace was not the supernatural existential (nor the related idea of the anonymous Christian), but his conviction that grace, most fundamentally, is the uncreated gift of God’s very self to the human person. Just weeks before his death in 1984, Rahner gave a talk summing up his life’s work under four “experiences.” The second was God’s self-communication: For me, therefore, the true and sole center of Christianity is the real self-communication of God to creation in God’s innermost reality and glory. It is to profess the most improbable truth, namely, that God in God’s very self with infinite reality and glory, with holiness, freedom, and love can really and without any holding back enter the creatureliness of our existence. Everything else that Christianity offers or demands of us is by comparison only provisional or of secondary importance.
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Rahner succeeded in midwifing this conviction into the mainstream of Catholic theology. As Ursula Lievenbrück has narrated in detail in the aptly titled Zwischen donum supernaturale und Selbstmitteilung Gottes, the Catholic theology of grace underwent a dramatic transformation in the twentieth century from thinking of grace primarily (or, in some cases, exclusively) as a created “supernatural gift” to considering it as “God’s self-communication.” 106
Rahner, to be sure, developed the ideas of divine self-communication and the supernatural existential in association with each other. I would contend, however, that it is possible to distinguish them. Rahner’s argument that grace consists in the communication of the uncreated gift of God’s self focuses on the metaphysics of the graced human person’s deifying communion with God; the supernatural existential concerns, primarily, the extent and mode by which this gift is given. Classified within a traditional de gratia register, the former concerns divine indwelling; the latter, the nature-grace relation. One can embrace Rahner’s account of the primacy of uncreated grace, divine formal causality, and the human person’s proper relations to the Divine Persons without affirming his transcendental method or supernatural existential. Scheeben’s theology testifies that this is the case. As I have demonstrated, his theology betrays a substantial agreement with Rahner concerning human-divine union: both theologians, seeking to recover the theology of the early church and synthesize it with Latin Scholastic theology, argued that God communicates his very self to the creature through uncreated grace as a divine formal-cause, bringing the creature into proper relations with the Divine Persons. Yet Scheeben offers this account without the commitment to a universal, transcendental experience of grace that Rahner’s critics find so troubling. In so doing, Scheeben’s theology refocuses our gaze on the fundamental contribution of Rahner’s monumental theology of grace, and, in a perhaps unexpected way, can repropose it to a new generation of theologians for whom the name “Rahner” elicits suspicion. 107
The importance of Scheeben’s and Rahner’s conviction that grace consists in the gift of God’s uncreated self is manifold; here, in closing, I will name three implications for contemporary theology. First, the theological current represented by Scheeben and Rahner both prompted and morphed into a personalist theology of grace in the latter half of the twentieth century. Theologians decided that they could better express Scheeben’s and Rahner’s core idea of God’s self-communication within a personalist framework than with admittedly clunky Scholastic terms such as “divine quasi-formal causality.” 108 However, Scheeben’s and Rahner’s detailed analyses of human union with God (which, in part, can be attributed to their Scholasticism) offer a granularity that personalism cannot. As David Coffey puts it, personalism “secures impact,” whereas Scholasticism “makes for precision.” 109 Both are needed. Second, Scheeben and Rahner continue to challenge theologians to explore with rigor the trinitarian contours of grace. Their work serves as a prompt to revisit the dispute about proper vs. appropriated relations between the human person and the Divine Persons—a controversy that was broken off rather than settled. Third, the recalibration in the Roman Catholic understanding of the relation between created and uncreated grace contains untapped ecumenical resources for dialogue with Protestant and Eastern Orthodox Christians, both of whom tend to reject the notion of created grace. 110 Although Scheeben and Rahner both affirm created grace, their work stands as a lasting reminder that grace, in the final analysis, is the gift of God’s very self.
