(v. grace)
(ESQUERDA BIFET, Juan, Dictionary of Evangelization, BAC, Madrid, 1998)
Source: Dictionary of Evangelization
Within theological anthropology, “supernatural” is used in contrast to natural, to designate everything that surpasses nature, everything that in man is not subject to the conditions of creation.
Historically, the elaboration of this term and the concept it expresses was carried out in three fundamental stages. It appears for the first time in the 13th century, when the entry of Aristotelianism provokes Scholasticism to a deeper reflection on the concept of nature-natural, which until then, following the Augustinian interpretation, indicated only the concrete state in which humanity had started to exist.
But from then on, especially with Saint Thomas, natural will indicate what belongs to the essence of man, what is “due” to his being as a creature; by contrast, supernatural will designate those gifts “not due” to nature, free gifts, such as immortality, integrity, sanctifying grace, the beatific vision.
The second stage takes place in the XVI-XVII centuries, when the word “supernatural” enters the same documents of the Church (cf. DS 1921, 1923), as a consequence of the controversy with Baio, who practically denied the gratuitousness of elevation to the supernatural order, affirming that man was called to the vision of God in the state of original integrity, without the newness of Christ. To defend this gratuitousness, theology will resort to the hypothesis of “pure nature”, that is, to the possibility that God had of creating a man endowed with those goods that corresponded to him by virtue of his nature, excluding the call to beatific vision and communion with him. The introduction of this hypothesis will notably change the way of seeing the supernatural: indeed, it will seek to determine more and more those perfections “due” to human nature, those elements that belong to man “constitutively”, “consecutively” (what he can achieve with the forces of nature), or ” demandingly ” (what is required for nature to achieve its own end). The supernatural will be defined, negatively, as everything that does not belong to nature in any of these three ways, and will be . J seen as an external addition that certainly perfects human nature, but not intrinsically, since it is already perfect in its natural order.
The third and final stage that has developed a special reflection on the supernatural began at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, when, against enlightened rationalism and the various forms of immanentism, the category of the supernatural will appear as one of the essential instruments of theology to think about the relations of the Kingdom of God with the world and its institutions (cf. DS 3689), and it will seem so important that the theologians who, in reaction against this “extrinsicism”, wanted to return to the position of Saint Thomas , they will be severely admonished to sufficiently emphasize the gratuity of the human vocation (cf. DS 3891).
After all these discussions, in current theological anthropology it is preferred, to speak of this aspect, to start precisely from the really existing man, from man as a creature of God and called to divine filiation in Christ. In this sense, these two moments (natural-supernatural) of God’s unique salvific project must certainly be distinguished, but not separated. It is true that the second moment does not depend on the first, since then God would depend on man and Christ would no longer be the supreme gift; but at the same time this second moment demands the first, that is, creation, which has no other purpose than to make God’s communication possible.
G. Occhipinti
Bibl.: G, Colombo, Supernatural, in DTI, 1V 348-359: G. Boff Supernatural. in NDT, 11, 1673-1687; J. Alfaro, The natural and the supernatural. Historical study from Santo Tomás to Cayetano (1274-1534), Madrid 1952; H. de Lubac, The mystery of the supernatural. Estela, Barcelona 1970: K, Rahner, On the relationship between nature and grace, in Escritos de teología, 1, Taurus, Madrid 1961, 327-350; í d., Nature – and grace, in Ibid. 1V 215-243.
PACOMIO, Luciano, Encyclopedic Theological Dictionary, Divine Word, Navarra, 1995
Source: Encyclopedic Theological Dictionary
The word designates what surpasses nature; however, precisely the concept of nature is not univocally defined theologically, since it also serves to designate the divine nature. More exactly, it means that which has not been created and, as uncreated, has repercussions on nature as created. For only where such repercussions can be traced is it possible to sensibly ask from the created for something supernatural. The formation of the word, and therefore also the concept itself, is strictly parallel to “meta-physics” (= after, behind, beyond and, in this sense, above nature), although in reality it is about a representation that wants to highlight the top-down orientation. In any case, these concepts suppose a vision of reality on different planes. The Christian expression “supernatural” indicated the aspect of reality that is not subject to the conditions of creation, which, however, for it and seen from it, is necessary, without creation being able to determine it in any way.
From the Judeo-Christian revelation, a distinction in this sense is inevitable; but the problem of an analogous formation of the concept leads to those difficulties that accompany and often characterize the path of the “supernatural” concept in the history of theology. H. de Lubac has traced this history in his most important stages in Surnaturel (1946) and in Augustinisme et Théologie moderne, as well as in Le Mystére du Surnaturel (both 1965). The historical demonstration of an earlier existence of the word in the late Middle Ages does nothing to change H. de Lubac’s actual discovery that the true efficacy of the concept stems from the dispute around Bayus and C. Jansen, and in this context it is related to the conception of orders of the supernatural and of the natural more or less independent and complete as a decisive element of a system.
Man can hardly conceive of a supernatural order as such, and even a system, because he does not have access to this reality in the created or outside of it. That is why the transcendence of that order must be discovered or manifested as immanent, without being able to affirm a necessary link between the created and the supernatural. As H. de Lubac has shown, it is even more delicate and risky to trace an order or a system of pure nature as an opposite concept. Instead of being able thereby to ensure the full independence, gratuity and freedom of the supernatural, as its defenders claim, the attempt rather leads to the consequence that the supernatural is superfluous, and ultimately just an absurd duplicate of what we know. as nature/creation.
In reality, this conception of the supernatural receives its content from the known, that is, from the natural/created, and is then presented as a meeting of already known elements on a supposedly superior plane, abstracting from the created limitations. However, the image thus drawn cannot precisely express the peculiarity of the supernatural; its meaning is doubtful. To arrive at another conception, it will be necessary to begin by including the concept of God from the Judeo-Christian tradition, as already attempted above, specifying nature as the created. God then appears as creator in the full sense where he achieves his supreme goal in this action: his own self-communication to what is not him. In this sense, it would be “supernatural” what constitutes this self-communication directly or indirectly, as well as everything that is affected by it to the extent that this is the case. This man can know by virtue of revelation; As much as it affects him to the depths of his constitution, he cannot outline it from him.
The Christian peculiarity of the supernatural certainly requires a conception that includes the full and definitive self-communication of God in Jesus Christ. Only in this light does the concept of creation also acquire those contours that allow it to be known and judged not only as a designation of a neutrally conditioned situation, but as an expression of a personal will and action, and therefore as a basically personal expression. The vocation to divine filiation expresses the relation of the created to the supernatural, and with it its supernatural orientation, in a fuller and deeper way than the discussed “desiderium videndi Deum”. However, the difficulty arises that a historical event, subject to the limitations of space and time, be attributed a meaning that by its nature cannot correspond to any specific historical data. To avoid this difficulty, it seems essential to discover in the general human disposition the correspondence to the manifestation of Jesus, that is, those assumptions of knowledge, understanding and adherence that allow man to know and recognize in Jesus Christ the mediation and the reference to the supernatural. K. ! Rahner speaks in this regard of “supernatural existential” and of a Christology that is searching by virtue of the development of the idea of an absolute savior, conditioned by experience. H. de Lubac refers to the common conception of the twelfth-century scholastics when he declares: “The creation of the Spirit has its goal not in itself, but in God” (Le Mystére du Surnaturel, Paris 1965, 132), without questioning why this in the least the gratuitous character of grace or the free responsibility proper to man. A further evolution of these fundamental positions took place where grace was specified above all from knowledge, or from freedom or from beauty. Placing the accent on the truth, the good or the pleasure conditions various orientations, which can also be carried out antithetically. But if in this way unilateral facets are not favored at the expense of the other respective accents, which have their absolutely own right, it is only possible to see it in its achievements and in its consequences. Nor is the choice of a theological perspective simply an innocent possibility with respect to the object.
The meaning of the supernatural in theologies with different accents has a singular impact on orientation and behavior with respect to the world. Not by chance, political theology and liberation theology (I Theology, V and VI) have turned against a privatization of the life of faith or against a Christianity that stands before the world neutrally or in an attitude of renunciation. The orientation to the ultimate goal -conceived individually or socially- cannot ignore that the realization of this destiny is…