The Sacred Monster of Thomism: An Introduction to the Life and Legacy of Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P (review)

After studies at Bordeaux, Flavigny, and Paris and after teaching philosophy and dogmatic theology for four years at Le Saulchoir, his order's school of theology, the French Dominican theologian Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange (1877–1964) taught dogmatic and spiritual theology at the Angelicum in Rome from 1909 to 1959. Garrigou-Lagrange, strongly impressed by his teacher Ambroise Gardeil, O.P., was a strident proponent of a strict neo-Thomist theology, a prolific author of neo-Scholastic textbooks on dogmatic and spiritual theology, and an influential consultant to the Holy Office. He was a prominent early opponent of the nouvelle théologie (cf."La nouvelle théologie: où va-telle?," Angelicum 23 [1946] 126–45) propounded in the mid-twentieth century by such theologians as Yves Congar, O.P., and Henri de Lubac, S.J., and he influenced the strong criticism of this thought in Pope Pius XII's important encyclical Humani Generis (1950).Garrigou-Lagrange also directed numerous doctoral dissertations, including those of M.-D. Chenu, O.P., and Karol Wotjy/la. Hostile to the anticlerical Third Republic and absent from France during most of World War II, he supported Marshal Petain's Vichy government and is reported by Jacques Maritain to have admonished Maritain, at one time a personal friend, that his support of General Charles de Gaulle's Resistance during the war was a mortal sin. Due to advanced age and declining health, Garrigou Lagrange participated little in the preparatory work for the Second Vatican Council and not at all at the Council itself.

In The Sacred Monster of Thomism (a title derived from a remark of François Mauriac), Richard Peddicord, O.P., currently president of the Aquinas Institute of Theology in St. Louis, provides the first book-length treatment of a once influential confrère whose extensive writings have been neglected in recent decades. From a perspective almost invariably sympathetic to Garrigou-Lagrange's theology and spirituality, although not to his political judgments, Peddicord outlines Garrigou-Lagrange's life and recounts his controversies with such adversaries as Henri Bergson, Maurice Blondel, Chenu, and Maritain. Apart from compact accounts of Garrigou-Lagrange's conception of revelation and the nature of theology, Peddicord devotes surprisingly little space to presentation and analysis of Garrigou-Lagrange's extensive theological publications and even less to clear and objective accounts, based on the primary sources, of the positions Garrigou-Lagrange opposed; even the influential attack on the nouvelle théologie is examined only cursorily. The occasional polemical critiques of such contemporary American authors as Roger Haight, Monika Hellwig, and Elizabeth Johnson are out of place. Nonetheless, although not all will agree with the positions defended by Garrigou-Lagrange and Peddicord, the historical information included in this volume will be of interest even to readers who do not share Peddicord's optimistic assessment of the value of his fellow Dominican's contribution to the future development of Catholic theology.

Some corrections on details: Nazi Germany annexed only part of Czechoslovakia in 1938 (p. 96). On p. 139, n. 13, in the citation from Garrigou Lagrange, read "la véritable doctrine thomiste" for "la extrêmes doctrine Thomiste." Spot checks of the index indicate that all page references to Patrick Granfield, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Komonchak, Karl Rahner, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Paul Tillich, and Herbert Vorgrimler are inaccurate.