The supernatural has not gone away. As I write this, an exhibition is underway in London, and another in Oxford, dedicated to fortunetelling, past and present. Preparing for this essay, I went to both. Conversations around me among visitors, especially younger visitors, showed a live interest in the topic, not just historical or artistic curiosity. The Oxford exhibition went out of its way to withhold anything that might look like judgment. Indeed, it encouraged its participants to have a go at fortunetelling themselves. At the same time, newspapers are reporting that church attendance is growing significantly, again among younger people, and that they are overwhelmingly drawn to churches were the supernatural is firmly on the agenda, where God is still said to speak and heal.

Interest in fortunetelling and miracles, and belief in God, is back in vogue. This speaks to the persistence of the supernatural. But what do we mean by “supernatural”? Or, for that matter, what do we mean by “nature” and the “natural”? In his brilliant book Keywords, the late-twentieth-century literary critic Raymond Williams wrote that “nature” is “perhaps the most complex word in the language.” He had in mind the contrast between “nature” and “culture,” but the same could be said about how “nature” relates to “supernatural.” Indeed, debates around nature, the supernatural, and their relation proved to be some of the most heated, and even fractious, in twentieth-century theology.

To explore the ideas of nature and the supernatural, it is useful to start with a stark distinction which lies at the heart of Christian theology, and then see how it might be subverted, at least to some degree. That distinction is the greatest and most significant of all distinctions: between God and creatures. There is God, there is all that God creates, which is not God, and that is it. There is no middle ground, no intermediate hybrid (and that includes Jesus).

Thomas Cole, The Voyage of Life: Youth, oil on canvas, 1842. WikiArt (public domain).

Coming at the idea of the supernatural from this perspective, by “nature” we would mean creation, and what lies above and beyond nature (the supernatural) is God. If that is what we mean by natural, then human beings are natural. So are earthworms, and – significantly – so are angels and archangels, and even the most glorious of the seraphim. God created the heavens and the earth, and all things visible and invisible, as the Nicene Creed has it. God is God, and creatures are creatures. Set out that way, only God is supernatural.

There is another way of speaking, however, which is the more common use of these words, in which “nature” refers to everything about creation that involves it getting on with doing what creation does, while the “supernatural” involves God working with creation in a way that takes it beyond its inherent nature. For instance, if someone sustains a wound and her body heals itself, that is nature. If, however, she sustains a wound and she is healed miraculously, with God acting outside the tendencies or capacities of nature, that is supernatural. Sometimes this distinction between nature and the supernatural is articulated as one between nature and grace.

With that distinction in place, human beings complicate the picture. Historically speaking, Christian theologians have not thought that the human soul has a natural origin. What is most central and distinctive about each human being would be created directly by God, outside of any natural process. Not every theologian or tradition follows that line but, for those who do, human beings are only natural in one sense: they are creatures doing creaturely things. In another sense, however, there is something supernatural about them, since, unlike a cat or dog, the human soul or person is more than what nature can bring forth. It is a work of God, beyond nature.

Even if you think that each human being can have a natural origin, challenges remain. Once a creature like us has arrived on the stage, a creature that can know and love, a hard distinction between the natural and the supernatural becomes more difficult to uphold. Questions about God start to arise, just from living a natural life naturally. We might start asking where everything comes from. We might ask why there is anything at all, rather than nothing. We might wonder why the universe is as it is. We might ponder whether goodness, truth, and beauty are more than just names we give to things. It begins to seem that nature, without for a moment being anything other than natural, cannot be totally sealed off from God, since it can only be understood properly in terms of its relation to God, which is to say, in relation to the supernatural.

Once a creature like us has arrived on the stage, a creature that can know and love, a hard distinction between the natural and the supernatural becomes more difficult to uphold.

Human understanding, then, might warn us against drawing an absolute distinction between the natural and the supernatural. However, what really set the cat among the pigeons in the twentieth century was not understanding but desire, not knowledge but love. That takes us to the heart of some Catholic disagreements, which have proved to be fertile for Protestants too.

In the early twentieth century, Catholic theologians tended to believe in a natural human desire to know something about God. That desire might be clouded by sin, but at the heart of each human being, when we are functioning anything like we should, lies a desire to know our Creator. However, the idea went, since such a desire is natural, it must be something that God satisfies within the limits of what is naturally and humanly possible. A perfect human being, unsullied by sin, would be a great philosopher. She would know all that can be known about God within the bounds of natural reason and, by that, her natural desire to know God would be satisfied.

The great provocateur against this position was the French Jesuit Henri de Lubac (who deserves to be remembered, among other things, for his part in heroic resistance to the Third Reich during World War II). He didn’t think that our desire for the infinite God could be fulfilled through even a perfect finite attempt to know God (even assuming such a perfect knowledge were attainable), using what is available to us in worldly terms. He did not think that it would be enough for us simply to know that there is a God, or to reach some natural conclusions about what God is like. No: we want to know God as God. De Lubac’s claim can be set out using a familiar line from Saint Augustine of Hippo: Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless until they find rest in Thee. This Augustinian insight complicates the relationship between the natural and the supernatural. If our nature is not satisfied by anything less than God, there must be a natural desire for the supernatural.

Thomas Cole, The Voyage of Life: Childhood, oil on canvas, 1842. WikiArt (public domain).

Readers might not find the idea of a natural desire for the supernatural problematic, but de Lubac’s opponents objected strenuously, and their objections were not without sense. Following Aristotle, they took it as an inviolable rule that nothing about nature is in vain. That means there can be no natural desire that is inherently thwarted on its own terms, no desire that cannot be fulfilled except by nature going beyond nature. To suppose otherwise seemed to imply one of two unpalatable possibilities. One is that God created doomed creatures, at least when taken on their own terms: doomed to be thwarted by their own natural desires, since the supernatural – as knowledge, vision, and repose in God – is precisely what nature cannot supply for itself. The other possibility, they thought, would be an equally troublesome curtailment of divine freedom, with the idea that God made creatures that God is then bound to elevate beyond nature. That seemed to offend against the idea that grace, and the vision of God, are gifts of God, entirely free and gratuitous.

Behind these reasons also lay a desire to uphold the goodness of creation. Yes, human beings are fallen. Yes, we corrupt the world around us in a variety of ways. However, that does not undo the fact that God called creation good in the beginning, even “very good.” The theology against which de Lubac took his stand wished, nobly, to oppose the idea that creation is fallen simply as creation, or that it lacks an inherent, God-given integrity. Nature, his opponents wanted to say, does not need grace, or the supernatural, to be very good.

It is important to note that more is at stake here than simply a discussion of the effects of sin. Certainly, no sinful creature has the capacity to know God as God, but neither does any entirely sinless creature. The focus in these disputes is the “beatific vision”: the entirely, absolutely, transcendently fulfilling vision of God. No sinner can see God and live, but neither could an entirely unfallen person, nor even the most elevated archangel. It’s a widely held opinion, across Christian traditions, that no creature has a natural capacity for seeing God: the vision of God is given as an elevating gift of grace.

We might say that human nature is like a rubber band. Among other things, rubber bands are good for holding together bundles of pencils. A sinful person is like a broken rubber band, which is no longer capable of doing even that. The vision of God, however, is not like holding together a bundle of pencils; it is like containing molten gold. A broken rubber band cannot do that, but neither can a pristine one. To receive the vision of God, we need to be elevated beyond what we are by nature. Only by God can we see God.

The worries that de Lubac’s opponents presented about a natural desire for the supernatural can be addressed. For one thing, nature itself is already an entirely gratuitous gift. Creation is the gift that invents its recipient. To any attempt to rope off the natural from the supernatural we can reply “Too late!” To risk an understatement, the creation of everything out of nothing is not something that belongs to nature. At the outset, creation has the character of superfluity and excess that we otherwise associate with miracle and grace.

It begins to seem that nature cannot be totally sealed off from God, since it can only be understood properly in terms of its relation to God, which is to say, in relation to the supernatural.

What about the danger of God tying his hands by creating creatures with a desire for him that he must fulfill? Well, in creating, and in creating as God has, God was also entirely free. God did not need to create creatures with the sort of openness and longing that can only be fulfilled by grace. If God does create such creatures in such a way, nothing forced God’s hand. Nor should anything about our nature embolden us to make hubristic demands on God – even if we hadn’t sinned. The human desire for God should rather bring us to our knees in humble supplication. We can only ask; only God can give. What God gives rests on what God is like, far more than it rests on what we are like, not least because God always preempts us: “Before they call, I will answer” (Isa. 65:24).

Taking a step back again and thinking again about the foundations of our theme in terms of the words we use, de Lubac has yet more to offer. He was keen that we should use the words “nature” and “supernatural.” That’s not two nouns (nature and supernature), or even two adjectives (natural and supernatural). It’s a noun and an adjective. De Lubac’s idea was that we are only ever talking about what God makes (nature) and the state to which God might elevate it (a supernatural state). God does not make a new and independent sort of thing (supernature); he takes what he has made and pours his grace upon it. God takes what he has created and while leaving it still entirely created, raises it up. That elevation doesn’t turn nature into something else, as if it were no longer nature. God doesn’t erase anything and start again.

To recap: Christianity insists that God is God and creatures are creatures: earthworms, humans, and angels alike. Creatures are entirely dependent on God for their being and character, while God receives his being and character from no one and nothing else. Creatures are created, and natural: they live and move and have their being from God, according to the natures God has given them. On that view, we are in the realm of the supernatural only when God does more with a creature than its divinely given nature can achieve, for instance by healing, working miracles, or revealing himself in a way that could never be fathomed by natural reason.

And yet we can also think about ways in which the supernatural permeates creation as the natural realm. It can do so in the form of a question: Who is this God to whom this creation bears witness, simply by existing at all? Or it can take the form of a desire, which nothing in nature itself can fulfill. Such questions and desires might be called “supernatural” by a kind of analogy: they are the questions and desires of natural things, but they point to the supernatural God, who supremely exceeds nature.

With analogy in mind, we might turn to Karl Barth, a titan of twentieth-century theology, who is known for making a sharp distinction between God and creatures. Because of that distinction, his suggestion that the heavens – whether we mean the physical cosmos or the dwelling place of the angels – manage both to be created yet also to point beyond their createdness is all the more intriguing. For Barth, the way that the heavens exceed the earth presents us with an image or analogy for how God exceeds all of creation.

Thomas Cole, The Voyage of Life: Old Age, oil on canvas, 1842. WikiArt (public domain).

Other intimations of the supernatural might also suggest themselves to us, other moments or instances when creation, even in what is natural, exhibits a sort of plenitude that bears witness to God, or seems specially touched by God. Think of human creativity, in which we might hear an echo of God’s capacity to create “out of nothing.” Listen to a piano concerto by Mozart, or a fugue by Bach. Do they not possess a perfection which, although natural, seems also to point to something more than natural? Or consider thought and language. Although natural, they possess a kind of boundlessness. Or consider springtime, which John Henry Newman thought offers a glimpse of the invisible world bursting out in the visible. Springtime suggests something like grace, right there in nature at its most natural.

In this spirit, although we should insist that angels are entirely natural, in the sense of being creatures, they too have a foot in the supernatural realm, are wreathed in supernatural mystery and splendor. For one thing, they do not visit us of their own natural volition: to be an angel is to be God’s messenger. They are sent by God, and are only sent, I imagine, on some mission of grace, to elevate nature beyond nature. Or consider that, while no angel has a natural capacity to see God, nonetheless by God’s grace the holy angels do see the face of the Father (Matt. 18:10). Since to see God is to be filled with God, the holy angels are in that way more than natural: transfigured, aflame with grace. Even on the strictest definition of the supernatural, there is something profoundly supernatural about the angels.

Human beings might only enjoy that sort of transformation in the life of the world to come, but it’s good biblical theology to suppose that God dwells in the Christian here below: that we are, for instance, made temples of the Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 6:19). A beautiful story about one saint of the desert in the early church suggests that forgiveness is one way in which human beings can live lives even on earth that already seem more than human: “They said of Abba Macarius the Great that he became, as it is written, a god upon earth, because, just as God protects the world, so Abba Macarius would cover the faults which he saw, as though he did not see them, and those which he heard, as if he did not hear them.”

Ask someone on the street what he means by the supernatural and he will almost certainly talk about ghosts and devils and similar things. As we have seen, since any such things would be creatures, in that sense they would be natural, rather than supernatural. But we have started to allow a stretched sense of what “supernatural” might mean, and that might also apply here. If the holy angels, for instance, are somewhat supernatural, being messengers of grace and transformed by the vision of God, then the fallen angels would not quite be natural either. In their case, however, that would be more by deficit than excess. Evil is an attenuation, so their unnaturalness, their uncanniness, is more sub-natural than supernatural.

I should not end with demons but with Christ. Christianity is all about him. Does Jesus subvert the distinction between nature and grace? Yes and no. On the side of seeming subversion, he has divine humanity and human divinity; in him we encounter a human life that is God’s own life, a human existence that is God’s own existence. There seems no greater overthrow of categories than that, and yet our thinking about Jesus is also based on ways in which these distinctions – between God and creation, divinity and humanity – are respected and upheld. Christ’s humanity is no less human, no less natural, no less created than any other humanity. And, as Thomas Aquinas beautifully reminds us, nothing about the fact that Jesus is God short-circuits what it means for someone to stand before God as a creature. Jesus prayed and worshiped. He fasted and went to the temple and to the synagogue. He learned the Torah; he grew in grace; he was shaped in virtue. Jesus is no weird hybrid, lying somewhere between humanity and divinity; he is perfectly, unitedly, and distinctly both. In Jesus, we see that nature supernaturally elevated is no less natural. We are reminded that the task of Christianity in the twenty-first century is both to champion nature and to preach grace.