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Réginald Marie Garrigou-Lagrange OP (French: [gaʁigu lagʁɑ̃ʒ]; 21 February 1877 – 15 February 1964) nicknamed as The Sacred Monster of Thomism was a French philosopher, theologian and Dominican friar. He has been noted as a leading neo-Thomist of the 20th century, along with Édouard Hugon and Martin Grabmann.[1] He taught at the Dominican Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas, the Angelicum, in Rome from 1909 to 1960. There he wrote his magnum opus, The Three Ages of the Interior Life (Les Trois Ages de la Vie Interieure) in 1938.

Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange

OP
Garrigou-Lagrange as a young priest
Born
Gontran-Marie Garrigou Lagrange

(1877-02-21)21 February 1877
Auch, France
Died15 February 1964(1964-02-15) (aged 86)
Rome, Italy
Burial placeCampo Verano
Other namesGontran-Marie Garrigou-Lagrange
EducationUniversity of Bordeaux (medicine), Sorbonne (philosophy)
ChurchLatin Church
Ordained28 September 1902 (priest)
Writingssee below

Life


Gontran-Marie Garrigou Lagrange was born on 21 February 1877 in Auch, near Toulouse, France. His mother, Clémence Lasserre, belonged to the same family as the writer Henri Lasserre (1828-1900). The member of the family who would most enthrall his imagination was his grandfather’s brother, Maurice-Marie-Matthieu Garrigou (1766-1852), who had been a canon of the diocese of Toulouse. After his primary schooling in Auch, He began studying medicine at the University of Bordeaux in 1896. During his time at Bordeaux, he experienced a profound religious conversion after reading Life, Science, and Art by the Breton writer Ernest Hello (1828–85). Lagrange would later recall “In an instant," he said, "I saw that the doctrine of the Catholic Church was the absolute Truth about God, his intimate life, about man, his origin and his supernatural destiny. I saw as a wink that this was not a truth relating to the current state of our knowledge, but an absolute truth that will not pass, but will appear more and more in its radiance until we see God facie ad faciem..."


Entrance in the Order of Preachers


Along with this awakening, Garrigou discerned a vocation to the religious life and priesthood. He investigated several religious orders, spending time with the Trappists of Echourniac and the Carthusians of Vauclair, before deciding on the Order of Preachers, the “Dominicans.”[5]Garrigou-Lagrange entered the novitiate of the Paris province at Amiens in the fall of 1897. He received the Dominican habit on 10 October 1897 and the religious name Réginald. He professed his vows on 30 April 1900.[2] After the novitiate, Garrigou was assigned to the studium at Flavigny for studies in preparation for ordination to the priesthood. This preparation entailed the assiduous study of St. Thomas’ Summa theologiae under the guidance of the Regent of Studies, Ambroise Gardeil, O.P. During the course of studies, the Summa was examined in its fullness, question-by-question and article-by-article.

Garrigou was ordained to the priesthood on 28 September 1902. By virtue of his performance in the studium, his superiors recognized that he was destined for the intellectual apostolate of the Order; as Regent, Gardeil’s plan was to have Garrigou join the philosophy faculty of the province’s House of Studies. To this end, Garrigou began complementary philosophical studies at the Sorbonne in 1904.

In 1905, Garrigou returned to the House of Studies and began teaching the history of philosophy, with special emphasis on the thought of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Baruch Spinoza. His career as a philosopher, however, was short-lived: one year later, with the illness of one of the province’s theologians, Garrigou was called to accede to the chair of dogmatic theology at Le Saulchoir. This change precipitated what would become Garrigou’s immersion of the works of Thomas Aquinas and the key figures of the Thomist school, particularly John of St. Thomas, Thomas Cajetan, and Domingo Báñez.

In 1909, Garrigou published his first major work—Le sens commun, la philosophie de l’être et les formules dogmatiques. This work was a critique of the thought of Édouard Le Roy a disciple of Henri Bergson. He judged that Le Roy’s use of Bergsonian evolutionism in his theological project amounted to a radical relativizing of the truth of the Church’s dogmatic formulations.

Le sens commun caught the attention of many, including the Master General of the Dominican Order, Hyacinthe-Marie Cormier, intent on strengthening the Order’s Roman university, the “Angelicum”, transferred Garrigou there that same year. He was specifically assigned to teach the course De revelatione.


The Angelicum


At the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas, At the Angelicum, Garrigou encountered another figure who would have a great influence on his theological project—the eminent Spanish Dominican mystical theologian, Juan González Arintero (1860-1928). Arintero, the author of the influential La Evolucíon mística, brought Garrigou to see that the full development of the Christian life cannot but be of the mystical order; he also helped him to see the significance of St. John of the Cross for the contemporary theological project. Garrigou’s classic work in spirituality, The Three Ages of the Interior Life, is greatly indebted to his colleagueship with Arintero: in it Garrigou takes Thomas Aquinas as his theological guide and John of the Cross as his spiritual companion.

After the First World War, he entered into an important collaboration with another of his Dominican brothers, Vincent Bernadot. He offered significant encouragement to Bernadot’s vision of a journal under Dominican auspices that would be devoted to reflection on the spiritual life. When La vie spirituelle became a reality in 1919, he contributed three articles to its first volume.8 Before his retirement, he would contribute a host of articles to La vie spirituelle.

In 1917, the Angelicum established with prompted from Pope Benedict XV, the first chair of ascetical-mystical theology in the Church’s history. From the beginning, Garrigou was its intended recipient. He held this honor until the end of 1959; as the years went by, and as his renown grew, Garrigou’s public lectures on spirituality (held every Saturday afternoon that the Angelicum was in session) became one of the required stopping points for theologically minded visitors to Rome.


Garrigou-Lagrange and Jacques Maritain


Also after the First World War, Garrigou began a significant collaboration with the eminent French Thomist philosopher, Jacques Maritain (1882-1973). Maritain, who had been named professor of the history of modern philosophy at Paris’ Institut Catholique in 1914, had the dream of establishing an organization devoted to the study of the philosophy and theology of St. Thomas Aquinas. He envisioned a network of local groups coordinated by a director and bound together by a constitution. There would be an annual gathering of these local groups that would include time for spiritual renewal through a preached retreat. Maritain’s vision became the Thomist Study Circles; he and his wife Raïssa prevailed upon Garrigou-Lagrange to become the group’s spiritual director.

Garrigou worked closely with Maritain in the early years of the Thomist Study Circles; indeed, he preached all but one of the annual retreats from their inception in 1922 until 1937. However, as the years went by, the relationship between the two became more and more strained. The cause of tension involved disagreements occasioned by the turmoil of European politics in the 1930s and 1940s. Specifically, Maritain supported the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War while Garrigou supported Francisco Franco; Garrigou supported the government of Philippe Pétain at Vichy France while Maritain supported the French Resistance and General de Gaulle. Sadly, the twentieth-century’s most prominent Thomistic philosopher, and Thomism’s most eminent spiritual theologian, ended their collaboration over contrary judgments concerning the contingencies of European politics


The Third French Republic


It is important to note that at the time of Garrigou’s birth, the Third French Republic was beginning its eighth year. The humiliation of the country’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, epitomized in Napoleon III being taken prisoner by the Germans—was still a feature of national consciousness. France had lost Alsace and Lorraine to Germany, as well as all pretensions of an empire.4

The leaders of the Third Republic were hostile to the Church; once again the anti-Catholic rhetoric of the French Revolution became the currency of the land. Indeed, the government was committed to an explicit program of dechristianization—particularly through its education laws:

The law of 1880 forbade religious teaching in State schools, while that of 1886 removed from these schools the teachers belonging to religious orders. The teacher’s training colleges were reorganized and increased in numbers and formed a new body of teachers with an entirely different spirit. Catholic teachers disappeared gradually from the field of public education and by 1914 the great majority of their successors owed no allegiance whatever to the Church....9

In Catholic circles, the Third Republic was notorious for more than its education laws. Émile Combes, prime minister from 1902 to 1905, had as his expressed goal the destruction of French Catholicism.10 The expulsion of the religious orders in 1904—which forced the Dominicans to leave Flavigny for Le Saulchoir in Belgium—was part of this overall goal.

It is no wonder, then, that Garrigou-Lagrange had no love for “republicanism” in general and a strong distaste for the Third Republic in particular. He was himself one of those forced into exile; he experienced first-hand the hateful policies of his own government. This goes a long way in accounting for Garrigou’s eventual sympathy for Philippe Pétain and Vichy France. Moreover, it is not an exaggeration to claim that not since the Ancien Régime had a French government been more hospitable to the institutional needs of the Church.


Dominican Spirituality


The reinvigoration of the Order of Preachers in the nineteenth century was not merely an intellectual one: it was an explicitly spiritual enterprise. And, Garrigou, as a Dominican friar was deeply imbued with the character and principles of Dominican spirituality. In light of this, a brief excursus on Dominican spirituality is in order. Garrigou’s own “Le caractère et les principes de la spiritualité dominicaine”15 [3]will serve as the guide.

Prayer, ministry, study and community life are the four pillars of Dominican life. At first glance, the various principles that undergird these pillars do not seem to be easily reconciled. It would seem that contemplation, which is of the mystical order and presupposes silence and solitude, would be impeded by a life of study and active ministry. Concurrently, it would seem that one’s apostolic endeavors would be somewhat half-hearted if one is forever seeking quiet and explicit times for prayer. He asks: “How can these elements so opposed in appearance be reconciled in one and the same ideal? What is the dominant character which unites them?”[3]

The answer is found in the most elemental principle of St. Thomas’ theology of grace: grace does not destroy nature but perfects it. God’s grace elevates human nature, making it to be what God intended it to be. Dominican spirituality “does not suppress anything that can truly lead to one’s perfect sanctification and to that of one’s neighbor.”17 [3]Therefore it “does not hesitate to affirm principles which appear to be contrary, as long as each one for its part appears to be absolutely certain.”18[3]

This spirit of openness in Dominican spirituality comes from its dedication to Veritas, the Truth. He was intent on reminding his brothers and his students that the motto of the Order of Preachers is contemplari et comtemplata aliis tradere, to contemplate and to give to others the fruit of one’s contemplation.19

The contemplation undertaken by the Dominican is not ultimately an end in itself. It is directed toward being of service to one’s neighbor. Dominican contemplation, then, finds its perfection in the preaching of the Gospel and an important dimension of this preaching is done through the Order’s intellectual apostolate. Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange lived the life of a Dominican friar for 64 years—striving to incarnate in his own life the ideal proposed by St. Dominic and the saints of the Order.


The Modernist Crisis


Pope Pius X condemnation of modernism in his encyclical Pascendi dominis gregis (1907) had a great impact on the apostolate of Garrigou-Lagrange. Indeed, throughout his theological career, Garrigou would remain committed to the teaching of Pascendi; moreover, he would see it reconfirmed in Pius XII’s Humani generis (1950).

It bears noting that while at the Sorbonne Universityas a student, he had attended lectures by the likes of Émile Durkheim andLucien Lévy-Bruhl; he heard Henri Bergson lecture at the Collège de France. Later in life, he would point out that he had been present at a lecture where Alfred Loisy rehearsed his trademark theme: “Jesus preached the Kingdom of God, and it was the Church that came.”20[4]His experience at the Sorbonne convinced him that contemporary philosophy does not provide ground solid enough for explicating the truths of Catholic faith; it would confirm in him the conviction that the philosophy of Aristotle had no equal in this regard. The following quotation from M.-Rosaire Gagnebet, O.P. sums up Garrigou’s fundamental orientation in these matters:

If the mystery of God is accessible to our understanding in an imperfect, but true, fashion, through the formulae of faith, it is possible for the human person, by his reason guided by faith, to obtain an analogical understanding of these very fruitful mysteries, according to the expression of the First Vatican Council. This is the goal toward which the theology of Father Garrigou was directed and toward which he consecrated all the strength of his spirit.21


Final Years


Lagrange’s Tomb
Lagrange’s Tomb

By the fall of 1959, Garrigou’s energy had greatly dissipated. He was 82 years old and had been teaching at the Angelicum for 50 years. It was clear that the time had come for him to retire from active ministry. In 1960 he moved to the Priory of Santa Sabina in Rome, the headquarters of the Order and home to the Master General. Due to his frailty, he was unable to accept Pope John XXIII’s invitation to join the theological commission’s preparatory work for the Second Vatican Council. Eventually he had to be transferred to the hospital of the Fraternité Sacerdotale Canadienne on Rome’s via Camilluccia. He died there on 15 February 1964; his funeral liturgy was celebrated on 17 February 1964 in the Church of SS. Dominic and Sixtus, the College Church of the Dominicans at the Angelicum. In a public statement, Pope Paul VI lauded Garrigou-Lagrange as “a faithful servant of the Church and of the Holy See.”[3]


Thought


He is best known for his spiritual theology. His magnum opus in the field is The Three Ages of the Interior Life (Les Trois Ages de la Vie Interieure),[5] in which he propounded the thesis that infused contemplation and the resulting mystical life are in the normal way of holiness of Christian perfection. This influenced the section entitled "Chapter V: The Universal Call to Holiness in the Church" in the Second Vatican Council's Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen gentium.[6]

His great achievement was to synthesise the highly abstract writings of St Thomas Aquinas with the experiential writings of St. John of the Cross, attempting to show they are in perfect harmony with each other.[7]

Father Garrigou-Lagrange, the leading proponent of "strict observance Thomism", attracted wider attention when in 1946 he wrote against the Nouvelle Théologie theological movement, criticising elements of it as Modernist.[8] He is also said to be the drafter of Pope Pius XII's 1950 encyclical Humani generis, subtitled "Concerning Some False Opinions Threatening to Undermine the Foundations of Catholic Doctrine".[9]

In politics, like many neoscholastic theologians of his time, Garrigou-Lagrange was a strong supporter of the far-right movement Action Française and he also sympathized with Vichy France. In 1941 he praised the French collaborationist regime and its Chief of State Pétain in a letter written to his former disciple Jacques Maritain: "I am entirely with the Marshal, I see him as the Father of the patrie, blessed with a good sense verging on genius, and as a truly providential man".[10]


Influence


L'Osservatore Romano of 9–10 December 1950 lists Garrigou-Lagrange among the names of the preparatory commission for the definition of the Assumption of Mary.[11]

Garrigou-Lagrange taught many eminent Catholic theologians during his academic career at the Angelicum. He also supervised the doctoral research of Marie-Dominique Chenu, who was ordained in 1919 and completed his doctorate in theology in 1920 with a dissertation entitled De contemplatione.[12] In the period between World War II and the Cold War Garrigou-Lagrange was the "torchbearer of orthodox Thomism" against Modernism.[13] In 1926 he served as the definitive consulter to Pope Pius XI in declaring John of the Cross a doctor of the church.[14]

He is commonly held to have influenced the decision in 1942 to place the privately circulated book Une école de théologie: le Saulchoir (Étiolles 1937) by Marie-Dominique Chenu, O.P., on the Vatican's "Index of Forbidden Books" as the culmination of a polemic within the Dominican Order between the Angelicum supporters of a speculative scholasticism and the French revival Thomists who were more attentive to historical hermeneutics.[15]

Garrigou-Lagrange gave the retreat in Paris which attracted Yves Congar to leave the diocesan seminary in order to join the Dominicans.[16] Later, Congar's methodology was suspected of Modernism because it seemed to derive more from religious experience than from syllogistic analysis.[17]

Garrigou-Lagrange also supervised the doctoral research of Maurice Zundel who completed his dissertation in 1927 with a dissertation entitled L'Influence du nominalisme sur la pensée chrétienne.[18]

Perhaps the most famous of his students was the future Pope John Paul II, who was supervised by Garrigou-Lagrange for his doctoral research in the mid-1940s at the Angelicum, and whose encyclical Fides et Ratio is attributed to his training under the learned Dominican.

The International Dominican Foundation (IDF) established Réginald de Rocquois Foundation in his memory at Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas where he taught most of his career, which grants annual Réginald de Rocquois scholarships.[19]


Works


He produced 28 books and hundreds of articles. Among the most famous works are:

Commentaries on the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas
Theological works
Marian works
Philosophical works
Works in Latin (originals)
Works in Spanish (translated)
Other

See also



References


  1. Romero Carrasquillo, Francisco J. (2007-06-16). "Maritain's Thought and Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange". Ite ad Thomam: "Go to Thomas!". Retrieved 2013-06-17.
  2. Michael L. Coulter; Richard S. Myers; Joseph A. Varacalli (2012). Encyclopedia of Catholic Social Thought, Social Science, and Social Policy: Supplement. Scarecrow Press. pp. 124–. ISBN 978-0-8108-8266-9.
  3. Ibid. Forgotten Books. August 24, 2018. p. 368. ISBN 978-0656772391.
  4. Gagnebert. [Gagnebet, M. R. “L’oeuvre Du P. Garrigou-Lagrange: Itineraire Intellectuel et Spirituel Vers Dieu.” Angelicum, vol. 42, no. 1/2, 1965, pp. 7–31. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44620127. Accessed 15 Oct. 2022. "11. [Jésus a prêché le royaume et c'est l'Eglise qui est venue.]"]. Jstor. {{cite web}}: Check |url= value (help)
  5. The Three Ages of the Interior Life Online text.
  6. Mullady, Brian (2 April 2009). "Rehabilitation of Garrigou-Lagrange". Retrieved 2012-07-26.
  7. "A saint in Heaven", by Fr. Thomas Crean, http://www.christendom-awake.org/pages/thomas-crean/saint-in-heaven.htm Accessed 4-10-2012
  8. See “Where is the New Theology Leading Us? Archived 2013-10-04 at the Wayback Machine.” See also his later article "The structure of the encyclical Humani generis" and
  9. Carrasquillo, Francisco J. Romero (2010-10-23). "Quaeritur: Who are the Post-Conciliar Traditional Catholic Thomists?". Ite ad Thomam: "Go to Thomas!". "Maritain's Thought and Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange". Retrieved 2011-06-19.
  10. Shortall, Sarah (2021). Soldiers of God in a Secular World: Catholic Theology and Twentieth-Century. Harvard University Press. p. 93. ISBN 9780674269613.
  11. Accessed 2-6-2013
  12. Praeambula Fidei: Thomism And the God of the Philosophers, Ralph McInerny, 2006, https://books.google.com/books?id=3FY1gtVu37sC&pg=PA108 Accessed May 24, 2012; Nouvelle Théologie and Sacramental Ontology: A Return to Mystery, Hans Boersma, 2009, 136 https://books.google.com/books?id=514HmFl5y9AC&pg=PA136#v=onepage&q&f=false Accessed May 24, 2012
  13. "Treccani - la cultura italiana | Treccani, il portale del sapere". www.treccani.it. Retrieved 10 September 2013.
  14. "Garrigou-Lagrange . Il tomista d'assalto". www.avvenire.it. 15 February 2014. Retrieved 17 February 2014.
  15. http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/le-eredita-2-i-postumi-della-crisi-modernista_(Cristiani-d'Italia)/ Accessed 10 September 2013; Y. Congar, Chrétiens désunis. Principes d’un œcuménisme catholique, Paris 1937; The HarperCollins Encyclopedia of Catholicism, 304, https://books.google.com/books?id=7DmZB8fy_wcC&pg=PA303#v=onepage&q&f=false Accessed November 13, 2012; https://books.google.com/books?id=3FY1gtVu37sC&pg=PA38#v=onepage&q&f=false Accessed 10 September 2013
  16. Fergus Kerr, Twentieth-Century Catholic Theologians, (Blackwell, 2007), p10.
  17. http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/le-eredita-2-i-postumi-della-crisi-modernista_(Cristiani-d'Italia)/ Accessed 10 September 2013; Y. Congar, Chrétiens désunis. Principes d’un œcuménisme catholique, Paris 1937; The HarperCollins Encyclopedia of Catholicism, 304, https://books.google.com/books?id=7DmZB8fy_wcC&pg=PA303#v=onepage&q&f=false Accessed November 13, 2012
  18. "Maurice Zundel: Biographie". Archived from the original on 2013-08-25. Retrieved 2013-08-27. Accessed 26 August 2013
  19. "IDF Serving the Dominican Order and the Church" (PDF). IDF News, International Dominican Foundation. July 2012. Retrieved 2014-07-23.
  20. The server is not always on, so if the link times out, try again later.

Further reading






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