Rehabilitating Garrigou

It was inevitable, I suppose, that someone would work to rehabilitate the reputation of Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, perhaps the most prominent neo-Thomist assaulted by the nouvelle theologie .  Aidan Nichols does a fine job of it in his lucid  Reason with Piety, Garrigou-Lagrange in the Service of Catholic Thought , but Nichols’ quite objective account pretty much confirms everything one had picked up from de Lubac.

The problems are neatly illustrated by Nichols’ summary of Garrigou’s Trinitarian theology.

One the one hand, Garrigou draws some important conclusions from the doctrine of the Trinity.  The doctrine, he argues, resolves apparent contradictions in Christian theology.  How can God be both immutable and alive, seeing as “life implies self-communication or self-diffusion: in a word, fecundity”?  Nichols summarizes the answer: “If we replay that with God the exigence for such self-communicative, self-diffusive life is met by the act of creation, we find ourselves obliged to regard the creative act as necessary, in the sense of unfree . . . . As Garrigou puts it, ‘it seems that an infinite being must have an infinite fecundity, which cannot be manifested by the creation of inevitable finite beings.’”  Because God is Triune, even if He had not created “there would still have taken place in him a maximally abundant and intimate – hence a perfect – diffusive communication of his goodness.  The sovereign Good – which is here the most pertinent of the names of God expounded in rational theology – gives its intimate life, indeed its very nature, in the mystery of the divine Fatherhood.”

As I say, important and true.  But there is another hand.  Nichols begins his discussion with the observation that “Trinitarianism . . . forms no part of the deduction of properties from the concept of divine being.”  This doesn’t mean its marginal: “on the contrary, he calls it ‘this supreme mystery.’”  But that’s just the problem: The supreme mystery is an added layer on top of a theology of the one God that was worked out by deducing attributes from the claim that God is ipsum esse subsistens .  Saying it’s a mystery introduces just the nature/supernature divide that de Lubac objected to.  The same goes for Nichols’ insistence that Garrigou “balanced” reason and piety, mysticism and dogma.  If the logic of mystery doesn’t shape dogma from the beginning, theology’s in trouble.

That Trinitarian theology has not decisively shaped Garrigou’s theology is evident in the inference he adopts from the philosophy of being.  The first of these is the principle of identity, which, in Garrigou’s words, means that “the foundational reality must be wholly identical to itself: it is to existence as A is to A, Ipsum esse – pure Act, and in consequence absolutely one and unchanging and by the same token transcendent: essentially distinct from the world which itself is essentially multiplicity and becoming.”  For Garrigou, this is “reality’s fundamental and transcendent law,” Nichols claims.

But it hardly counts as a description of the actual foundational reality, which is Father, Son and Spirit.  Alongside the “is, is, is” (Father is God, Son is God, Spirit is God; Father is almighty, Son is almighty . . . .), Trinitarian theology insists on an equally fundamental, equally foundational “is not” (Father is not the Son is not the Spirit).  Difference is as basic as identity.