Dietrich von Hildebrand on the Natural Ends of Religion | Dr. Lance Byron Richey | Homiletic & Pastoral Review
The ultimate aim of all authentic religious practice, von Hildebrand always insists, is the creation of a truly supernatural life in the soul of the believer, in order to bring him to a final end with God that fallen nature can never hope to achieve with its own resources.
Few Christian philosophers of the 20th
century have had as keen an appreciation of the spiritual and religious
nature of the human person as did Dietrich von Hildebrand. One need
only recall the first lines of his classic Transformation in Christ to see the supreme importance of the supernatural destiny to which every man and woman is summoned:
God has called upon us to become new men in Christ. … This new life … is not merely a moral perfection qualitatively identical with natural morality, owing its supernatural meaning only to a super-additive gift of grace; it is Christ’s supernatural wealth of virtue, which in its very quality represents something new and distinct from all merely natural virtue. 1
At the same time, von Hildebrand consistently and explicitly denied that this religious destiny requires the destruction of our human nature, or that our supernatural end should even be seen as in fundamental tension with the ends to which we are directed by nature. The venerable theological principle, “Grace builds on nature, it does not replace it,” clearly governs his philosophy. However, while everyone knows that von Hildebrand considered religion to be of supreme importance in the supernatural life of man, little has been written about his understanding of the role of religious belief and worship (Christian or non-Christian) in ordering us towards our purely natural ends, or to put it in his language, in enabling us to achieve at least some of the purely natural “objective goods for the person.” To correct this neglect, this paper will examine von Hildebrand’s understanding of the “natural” ends of religion, and show how they contribute to the supernatural goals of all true religion.
In order to better appreciate von Hildebrand’s understanding of the “natural ends” of religious worship, I will first provide a brief overview of his understanding of the distinction and relationship between the natural and supernatural elements of the person. Next, I will identify some of those “objective goods for the person” that are proper to man as a natural being and, thus, do not require the gift of grace for their accomplishment. Finally, I will explore how, for von Hildebrand, religious belief and practice contributes to the accomplishment of these natural ends. While enabling man to reach these “natural” goods is obviously not the primary purpose of religion (which is the transformation of the personality of the believer through grace), it is, nevertheless, a real and important effect of religion that can be defended on a purely philosophical basis.
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