A growing network of churches, publishers, podcasts, and conferences in the United States and Europe has begun to “just ask questions.” These “questions” are about things like the “traditional narrative” regarding National Socialism and the Holocaust, the benefits of “race realism” and “ethnically homogeneous communities,” and whether interracial marriage or interracial adoption should be censured and considered “relatively sinful.”

Skinheads and Klansmen we have long had with us. What has happened over the last decade is something else, something more disturbing: it is an intellectual and indeed theological retrieval of racial supremacist and separatist ideas within Christian circles. As we exit what British historian Alec Ryrie has called the “Age of Hitler” – that is, the age when simply identifying an idea as fascist or Nazi was enough to discredit someone – we find ourselves needing to do something that has not been necessary since the Second World War: we must vocally refute and resist racial supremacy and narrowly exclusivist and hateful ethnonationalism. In this resistance, we must argue as Christians. And, increasingly, we must argue against other Christians – or at least against people who profess the name of Christ.

There are few better allies in this task than the French Jesuit theologian Henri de Lubac.

The Spiritual Resistance

In 1943, de Lubac was forced into hiding from the Nazis. Just two years earlier he had joined the “spiritual resistance” to Nazism through his participation in the clandestine journal Cahiers du Témoignage chrétien. (In English, the title translates to “notebooks of Christian testimony.”) This journal aimed to inform people about the anti-Christian forces infiltrating and corrupting the Roman Catholic Church. The Cahiers denounced the French Vichy regime and its Catholic supporters for collaboration with the Nazi occupiers, and provided accurate information about injustices, uncensored versions of papal pronouncements, and details about efforts of spiritual resistance to Nazism in other countries. In de Lubac’s own writing in Cahiers, he passionately tried to awaken the Church to resist the evils of Nazism. The group was eventually discovered. Several of de Lubac’s associates were captured, tortured, and executed, and he was forced to go into hiding. Even in hiding de Lubac continued to tirelessly resist the Vichy regime and critique Nazi ideology for its incompatibility with Christian theology.

Piet Mondrian, Church Tower at Domburg, oil on canvas, 1911. All artwork from WikiArt (public domain).

Among Catholics in France at the time, such resistance was rare. Multiple factors contributed to Christian collaboration with the fascists, many of which resonate with the circumstances of our own times. Over a century of secularization and hostility toward the Catholic Church alongside the perceived decadence in French culture made many Catholics open to radical right-wing visions. There were concerns about the dilution of French culture through immigration, low birth rates, and American films. The economic depression exacerbated class tensions, deepening cultural pessimisms that found their outlet in growing and bitter anti-Semitism. The specter of communism incensed a radicalized right, which in response began articulating a vision for a “True France” and a “France for the French.” Prime Minister édouard Daladier began talking about a “national renewal project,” which received support from the Catholic Church due to Daladier’s conservative social policies. All this was also inflected with xenophobia because of an influx of refugees from the Spanish Civil War. The “renewal project” confused notions of nationhood and race. Pope Pius XI wrote four encyclicals in 1937, including Divini redemptoris (a rebuke of atheistic communism) and Mit brennender Sorge (a rebuke of the racist ideology associated with Nazism). The Catholic periodicals gave first-page coverage to Divini redemptoris while largely neglecting Mit brennender Sorge.

Then, in 1940, Germany invaded and occupied Paris. Philippe Pétain negotiated a cease-fire with Hitler that included the division of the country into two regions: the Northern, which was occupied, and the Southern, which was “free.” In the Southern territory, headquartered in Vichy, Pétain gave himself more power than any French leader since Louis XIV. He advocated for a “National Revolution” based on the slogan “Work, Family, and Fatherland” – a replacement of the republican “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.” Ideologically, the National Revolution was an opposition to “liberal individualism.” It was an attempt to return to “old values” and overturn the heritage of the French Revolution in one fell swoop. Many did not have a rightful place in Vichy France: Jews, foreigners, freemasons, and communists. Oppressive measures were taken against political “undesirables” and anyone suspected of posing a danger to national security.

Many Catholics, including those in the hierarchy, swiftly supported Pétain and the National Revolution. Pétain was seen by many conservative Catholics as a “providential man,” and his revolution seemed to coincide with traditional values. Ecclesiastical leaders had high hopes for how this new order would restore the Catholic Church’s relationship with the state and prevail over secularism and communism. However, when Hitler invaded the Southern territory in 1942, a full-fledged war economy was put into place, requiring France to deliver more resources, soldiers, and workers to Germany. Germany began to implement the policy of rounding up and exterminating Jews, and required the French to help. Few offered meaningful resistance.

Piet Mondrian, Trees by the Gein at Moonrise, oil on canvas, 1908.

De Lubac believed that Pétain’s Vichy regime incarnated the political vision of Charles Maurras – the towering figure who provided leadership to Action française, a nationalist party that repudiated the revolutionary spirit and sought a return to the monarchy and social hierarchy. Though not a Christian, Maurras explicitly sought collaboration with the Catholic Church and wanted to rehabilitate it as a state religion in his program of uniting state, culture, and race. Maurras told a kind of secular salvation story: the “golden age” was the seventeenth century, while the “fall” occurred in the Revolution of 1789, which introduced a spirit of anarchy and perverse individualism encapsulated in the three ideas of liberty, equality, and fraternity. He saw an affinity of the “classical spirit” in Catholicism with its disavowal of individualism and progress, and thus pursued an alliance with the Roman Catholic Church to extirpate from France “the spirit of mystical anarchy.” Maurras wanted to restore “throne and altar” to purge France of individualism by restoring order, discipline, and hierarchy. Even before the occupation of France, many Catholics supported the program of Action française and Maurras throughout the first four decades of the twentieth century.

The Jesuit theologian Pedro Descoqs, under whom de Lubac studied, famously defended Maurras. For Descoqs, and many Catholics at the time, an alliance with Maurras’s secular political movement was conceivable because of a reading of Thomas Aquinas that took his distinctions between the truths of supernatural revelation and the truths of natural reason to insinuate that supernatural considerations are not relevant to the political sphere. This drew on the Aristotelian idea that all natural beings are ordered to ends they can attain by their own powers. Maurras thus distinguished “political facts” from moral and religious realities, promoting a strict separation between orders of religion and politics. Descoqs defended Maurras, saying that his system dealt with this-worldly matters that need not be shaped by theological considerations. Religious considerations were increasingly deemed irrelevant to broader society and politics.

In Descoqs’s affirmation of Maurras, de Lubac sensed that Descoqs abandoned both the supernatural claims and the social demands of Christianity, thus becoming an ally of secularism. According to de Lubac, Maurras and his ilk opened the way to a Nietzschean “brutal return to instinct.” They celebrated base affections, fanning them into flame as “natural” aspects of human existence, and resisting the reformation of those “instincts” according to Christian revelation. In this, de Lubac sensed the legacy of Nietzsche, whose genius was his appeal to the desire for greatness. However, this desire for greatness was promoted to stoke hatred between groups, resulting in an interpretation of history as what de Lubac called a “war between the races,” which was antithetical to the universalism of the Christian faith, the call to charity, and the path of renunciation enshrined in the cross. De Lubac saw Nazism as a form of neopaganism that sought “to corrupt Christianity from the inside, paganize it, strip it of its universalism, its charity, and its sense of the cross.” De Lubac argued that the Nietzschean “racist faith” of the Nazis, which he described as a “myth of blood,” needs to be opposed by “our Christian and Catholic faith.”

The Theological Resistance

De Lubac’s resistance took the form of a response to the distorted theology that undergirded the church’s collusion with Nazism. And his answers had to do with humankind’s supernatural origins and destiny, and, relatedly, the uniting vocation of the church. He took issue with the idea that humankind could be understood on purely “natural” terms: that human fulfillment or flourishing could be attained by natural goals or means, such as politics. In this, he attacked both a form of secular humanism and a naturalistic Aristotelianism masquerading as Christianity under the guise of a particular interpretation of Thomas Aquinas’s scholastic theology. He sought to undermine the assumption of modern humanism that to be truly humanistic one must be atheistic, showing that ultimately such visions were in fact inhumane. De Lubac wrote that the Church needed a “shock of revelation” to perceive the depths of humankind; that shock is most clearly provided in the person and work of Christ – who was the fullest revelation not only of God but also of man. And he argued that Christian theology had been complicit in promoting a religion insufficiently social. The supernatural and social dimensions of Christianity needed to be recovered.

Piet Mondrian, Village Church, mixed media on paper, 1898.

De Lubac insisted that we cannot understand human nature without reference to the supernatural. Humans have a “natural desire for the supernatural.” We have an ineliminable desire that draws us to that which lies outside our own powers; we are utterly dependent on supernatural fulfillment. Humankind by its very nature cannot be fulfilled through pursuit of worldly goods, be they familial, political, or racial, but only through orientation toward and fulfillment in the one ultimate end: God. The human is by nature not just a political animal, but more fundamentally a supernatural animal. As Augustine famously addresses God: “Our hearts are restless until they find rest in You.” Or as de Lubac insists: “Nature was made for the supernatural.”

This posed a challenge to Maurras (and others like him), whose slogan was “politics first.” The supernatural realities enshrined in Christianity will disrupt earthly projects and introduce complexity to temporal commitments. Humanity’s nature is twofold – animal and spirit. The human is thus committed to things of this earth yet drawn “beyond any terrestrial horizon [to seek] the atmosphere of eternity as its natural climate.” This rules out any worship of the state or nation; man cannot make an absolute out of any human society or earthly order. Christianity, thus, cannot be a religion that can help bolster the self-understanding of French Catholicism for the French in the way that worship of Athena bolstered the self-understanding of the Athenians.

The supernatural does not merely elevate nature or simply prolong its momentum. It does not merely “beef up” instinct and appetite, giving us superpowers to achieve our fleshly desires. No, the supernatural transforms nature by remolding it, exorcising what is opposed to its true fulfillment, and drawing it toward union with God. This does not entail that the human elements are overridden or abandoned. Rather, a culture will be “all the deeper and all the more Christian the more human elements it draws on … but all of them must be enlightened, judged, criticized, transformed, and unified by this assimilating principle called faith that is nourished by them.”

Henri de Lubac (1896–1991). Photograph from WikiMedia Commons (public domain).

For de Lubac this meant that the vocation of the church was integrally tied with unity. Humanity was originally constituted as one, with all persons sharing in the divine image. The Fall was a breach of this original unity – with God and other humans. Sin is a type of separation – a disruption that affects the individual soul and society. Redemption is a work of restoration; salvation is a recovery of the lost supernatural unity of humanity with God and the unity of human persons among themselves. This reshapes our understanding of “nature.” We need to understand human nature according to its end – in communion with God and with others in God.

This common destiny does not erase all differences, but it does mean that we cannot absolutize them as being a matter of human nature, because our nature is more fundamentally bound up with the supernatural than any worldly markers. And we cannot embrace them in a self-centered way or in service of stoking hatred of others. For de Lubac, the surge of racism – inside and outside of the church – was understood as one product of a separated theology. Theologians failed to squarely face this social problem and thus neglected one aspect of their mission. “Today,” says de Lubac, “when the essential doctrine of the unity of the human race is attacked, mocked by racism,” we should feel anguish that it is so weakly defended by Christian leaders.

De Lubac does not, however, think this means we cannot be patriotic. In an early essay on patriotism and nationalism, de Lubac explained that national loyalty also needs to be informed by the supernatural. It is not merely the case that the nation should be ordered to the supernatural; rather, our relation to the nation should also be reordered by it. The supernatural does not come to merely strengthen national aspiration; it comes to assimilate the nation into the kingdom of Christ and order it in light of that final end. For de Lubac, the Catholic Church is in the midst of the nation, but more fundamentally, transcends the nation and molds her members in ways that put national loyalty in its proper place. She has a universal mission and desires the union of diverse groups within her. This militates against absolute national loyalty. An improper nationalism also refuses all religious authority that places limits on national concerns, and it cannot comprehend the superior interests of the kingdom of God or the supernatural destiny of man. These supernatural realities undermine an absolute nationalism.

For de Lubac, one role of the church is to combat the perversions of “nature,” such as chauvinism, racism, and unhealthy nationalism. For de Lubac, salvation is social, supernatural (i.e., distinct from, integrally related to, but beyond the grasp of nature), and mediated. Together, these three aspects constitute the church as the indispensable social embodiment of transcendent realities for which humanity ineradicably longs but cannot obtain by its own resources.

This is the role that the church should be playing. The church is the herald and architect of unity. She proclaims to humanity the unity that was destroyed by the Fall, but which is humanity’s destiny, which was redeemed and secured by Christ. She is a provisional means and anticipation of this destiny. “The Church,” declares de Lubac, “is already here below, in mystery, the figure of that final and transcendent reality; the Church, who gathers human beings into the unity of her body; the Church, the true Jerusalem, within whom all creation of man must find its place in order to be transfigured there.” And thus, racism and narrow nationalism are a denial of humanity’s origin and destiny, and the universalism of the church. She cannot operate in the “exclusive service of one or another form of civilization.” The church knows that all races and cultures “have something to contribute to the proper use of the divine measure which she holds in trust.” She is the shelter to all the varieties of humanity; “she knows, too, that all men are one in community of their divine origin and destiny.” Her task is to “purify and give fresh life to each of them, to deepen them and bring them to a successful issue by means of the supernatural revelation that she holds in deposit.” The church is “the form that humanity must put on in order finally to be itself.” Humanity is ordered to finally be one in God.

Piet Mondrian, Evening; Red Tree, oil on canvas, 1908.

The church’s irreplaceable mission, therefore, is to remind humanity of its “divine supernatural vocation and to communicate to us through her sacred ministry the seed, still fragile and hidden, yet real and living, of our divine life.” All humanity shares this end, and thus the church is a truly open society, defined by the universalism of charity. De Lubac’s vision can thus be summarized as an “ecclesial humanism.” The church is the “sheltering womb and matrix of the new world” that remakes the world. The world, in a sense, was made for the church, because the church is the final community, that site of supernatural social life for which all were made and apart from which human nature will not be satisfied. The world belongs to her, and she remakes the human race. All other communities must find themselves in her – if they are to last. This will mean that the church will cause some unrest in the world. She will frustrate the ambitions of any and all who seek to make their fleshly identities, temporal projects, and earthly communities ultimate.

Joining the Resistance

We find ourselves now facing a recrudescence of some of the most poisonous ideas of the last century. But in de Lubac we see a powerful example of what it looks like to respond to the pernicious forms of ethnonationalism that rear their heads. His life shows us a brave, persistent, and clear-eyed rejection of a vision of Christianity that leaves behind the supernatural end of human nature and the social demands of the gospel. De Lubac conceives of the church as the divinely instituted site of humanity’s fulfillment. The paradox of human nature must be applied to sociality: only the eschatological transfiguration of human society by the in-breaking of God’s grace can complete human society. That in-breaking occurs socially in the church. And she ennobles and transfigures our sociality, because that is what the supernatural, which is mediated in the life of the church, does to nature.

When we lose sight of this, race and the nation can easily become ersatz churches – parodies of the body of Christ, which is the site of supernatural social life for which human nature is ordered. Because these are not the ultimate community to which human nature is ordered, they will fail to satisfy. We need to direct our restless sociality to the body that is God’s gracious instrument for supernatural social life, otherwise we will act less humanely, acting as though we forget who and what we are.

Both Nietzsche and the proponents of an unconverted Aristotelianism suspect on some level that Christianity hinders people from being human properly – by alienating them from their aspiration for greatness, by interfering with ethnic solidarity in favor of solidarity with their brothers and sisters in Christ. What de Lubac insists on is that this grasping on to what we think we need in order to be human will hinder us from reaching the fullness of humanity offered by Christ. These other pagan visions, as de Lubac perceived, intend to corrupt Christianity from the inside, strip it of its supernatural love that breaks down “natural” barriers. These visions debase Christianity and subjugate the church. Charity – revealed in Christ, given to those in him, generating his “body of charity on earth” – is what elevates and transforms humanity to be truly itself. It facilitates the unity of humanity, restoring it to its destiny. This is where strength truly lies.