ABSTRACT
Henri Joseph Sonier de Lubac (1896–1991) was born on 20 February 1896, at Cambrai, in northeast France, though the family soon returned to Lyons, their home ground. He attended a Jesuit school in Lyons. He studied law for a year, before entering the Lyons province of the Society of Jesus, then in exile in England. His noviciate was interrupted in 1914 when he was drafted into the French army. He saw action in Flanders, receiving the serious head wound that afflicted him for the rest of his life. He returned to the Jesuits, still in England. He seems never to have been regarded by his superiors as a future professor, either of philosophy or of theology. On his own, he studied Thomas Aquinas, in the light of Etienne Gilson’s ‘fundamental book’, which, he notes with some irony, was ‘in the bookcase of light reading that was generously unlocked for us during holidays’. He had already begun working his way through the Greek and Latin patrologies and the medieval scholastics, gathering the quotations out of which he would weave his books. As his younger colleague and friend Hans Urs von Balthasar would note, de Lubac preferred ‘to let a voice from the great ecclesial tradition express what he intends rather than raising his own voice’ — yet, unmistakably, his views ‘can be easily discerned in the web of quotations, especially when one pays close attention to the critiques and corrections of the passages cited’. 1
