Reason with Piety: Garrigou-Lagrange in the Service of Catholic Thought by Aidan Nichols, O.P. (review)

338 BOOK REVIEWS in order that the just requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit." Watson's account of Paul's exegesis will greatly enrich future consideration of Christ's relationship, as revealed by the New Testament, to the Mosaic law-as well as of Christians' relationship to the "law of Christ." How does Christ Jesus communicate to us? How do we learn who he is and what he has to teach us about the divine life and our lives? How can we live out the reconciliation that he has achieved? All six books reviewed here return us to these fundamental questions and remind us that the visible Church embodies answers to these questions (without negating their eschatological dimension). Exegetes and theologians ponder, in different ways, the mystery of what God, in Christ and the Holy Spirit, has brought forth in the world. University ofDayton Dayton, Ohio MATTHEW LEVERING Reason with Piety: Garrigou-Lagrange in the Service of Catholic Thought. By AIDAN NICHOLS, O.P. Naples, Fla.: Sapientia Press of Ave Maria University, 2008. Pp. viii + 152 (paper). ISBN 978-1-932589-49-8. R. R. Reno has written recently that Catholic theology "after the revolution"-after the labors of Henri de Lubac, Karl Rahner, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Marie-Dominique Chenu, and the other greats, that is-suffers from terminal idiosyncraticity. The achievements of the giants could be speculatively profound and historically incisive, sometimes in one and the same work, and were always brilliantly original as measured against the common foil of Leonine neo-Scholasticism. Because of this last point, alas, that is, because they were brilliant in unique ways, we of the next generation (or two), their heirs, have no theological lingua franca with which to speak among ourselves, no common theological discourse in which to educate our own successors, and no easy way to introduce a would-be student even into the thought of the great revolutionaries themselves, since the common foil against which they worked and which is necessary for understanding them, Leonine neo-Scholasticism, has largely vanished, dismantled by their common effort. Along comes Aidan Nichols, a man in the resurrection business, inviting us to look at an exemplar of theology very much before the revolution, namely Reginald GarrigouLagrange , O.P. (1877-1964). Nichol's characterization of Garrigou as a Thomist ofthe "Strict Observance" is important for understanding the inventory of his work that makes up the bulk BOOK REVIEWS 339 of this book. Such a Thomist holds that the philosophy and theology of St. Thomas alone provide the only wholly adequate instruments for the defense, for the most truthful expression, and for the exploration of revelation. Moreover, such a Thomist is confident that the commentatorial tradition, from Capreolus to Cajetan to John of St. Thomas and beyond, provides a reliable interpretive guide to and authentic development of the thought of St. Thomas. There is no need to get behind the tradition of commentators and scholiasts in order to find the "true" Thomas; the tradition in question, like the larger Tradition of the Church, is a window and even a magnifying glass, not an encrustation or opaque film obscuring our vision of what has been handed down. AThomist of the Strict Observance in the first part ofthe twentieth century, furthermore, was especially concerned to defend Catholic teaching from Modernism, which destroyed the objective reference of dogma as the expression of a revelation spoken from outside of us and made of it rather a token of interior religious experience and subjective aspiration. This takes us to Garrigou's intervention in the previous century's first great clash of theological arms, his brief contra Modernism. Nichols, in his discussion of Le Sens commun, la philosophie de l'etre et !es formules dogmatiques (1909), points us to the foundational philosophical commitments informing all of Garrigou's writing. Furthermore, with his usual conciseness and lucidity, he inventories the contents of Garrigou's theological oeuvre, from his theology of revelation to the great treatises on God and his attributes, through Christology and on to the theology of grace, predestination, and the mystical life. Nichols ends with...