The Suspended Middle

One mark of a great mind is that it will strike upon the fancy of diverse interpreters divergently; to observers of redactions or interpretations only, such a mind may well appear protean. Such is the mind and such the fate of Henri de Lubac, perhaps the greatest of several great Jesuit theologians of the twentieth century, and one of the most influential of ressourcement figures upon contemporary theologians. Yet de Lubac is considerably less protean than he appears in this study by John Milbank; indeed, it is fair to say that, in The Suspended Middle, de Lubac sounds more like Milbank than like himself. It is also fair to say that this slim book is less about de Lubac than about an evolving theological debate over the adequation of pluralism in which Milbank has his reasons for wishing to suborn de Lubac as an ally. One of these reasons is Milbank's critique of Hans Urs von Balthasar, who Milbank sees as having capitulated too much (certainly more than de Lubac) to Humani Generis (1950), and whose aesthetic theology Milbank sees as celebrating “the spectacle of a divine gnostic drama,” in contradistinction to “the serene eternity of the God-Man” he finds in de Lubac, Bérulle, and Bulgakov (14). In his The Theology of Karl Barth, von Balthasar draws the nouvelle théologie movement closer to neo-orthodoxy, as Milbank sees it, in which Barth's “Baroque contrast of nature with grace, and reason with revelation. . . had failed to reckon either with the analogia entis or the surnaturel as governing both philosophy and theology according to a logic rooted in a non-idolatrous understanding of the Creator-created divide” (65).

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