Un-trashing Neo-Thomism

For the record, R. R. Reno at First Things:

Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P. (1877–1964), was the twentieth-century Catholic theologian whose outlook and intellectual projects epitomized the confident intransigence of the pre-Vatican II Church. Professor of theology at the Angelicum in Rome for many decades, Garrigou-Lagrange taught Aristotle and St. Thomas to many generations of seminarians. As a consultant to the Holy Office, he played an important role in the intellectual politics of mid-century Catholicism. His reputation was clear: hardnosed about truth and in favor of the use of church authority in its defense ...

Neo-Thomism was trashed by progressives in the aftermath of Vatican II. “It fails to take history serious. The theology is remote from the real experience of modern men and women,” we were told. In the place of the Neo-Thomist synthesis, the Rahnerians promised a transcendental theology that would magically transform subjective categories into the language of faith. History, social context, personal experience—these human-centered phenomena would somehow extend the hand of friendship to the official teachings of the Church.

Garrigou fought against the new theologies that were advanced in the decades immediately prior to Vatican II. Indeed, his opposition was notorious. In the late 1940s, Henri de Lubac was bitter about “the kind of dictatorship that Father G-L is trying to exercise in the Church.” But Garrigou was prescient. Indeed, less than two decades after Vatican II, Henri de Lubac would end up ringing the theological alarms, reiterating the spirit if not the letter of Garrigou’s clear and rigorous Neo-Thomism.

I have never understood the animus against Neo-Thomism in the post-Vatican II Church. By my reading, the Second Vatican Council was a remarkable event, one that endorsed all sorts of changes and new directions in the Catholic Church. Historians rightly emphasize these changes. Yet, all the bishops who attended the Council, all the theological advisors who drafted the documents that were eventually adopted, all the major players were educated within the Neo-Thomist synthesis. Garrigou himself was the teacher of many important figures at the Council. Therefore, by any responsible historical judgment, the creative and lasting significance of the Council necessarily owes a great deal to the supposedly antiquated and discredited manual theology of Neo-Thomism.

We need not rely on generalizations. John Paul II was a young bishop at Vatican II. Throughout his long pontificate, he remained enthusiastic about the achievements and significance of the Council, especially the renewed emphasis on the Church’s engagement with the world. The Church contributes to world by speaking the truth about our humanity, a truth vouchsafed in Christ, a truth that must be spoken in season and out. And who directed Karol Wojtyla’s doctoral dissertation? Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange.

Neither Peddicord nor Nichols ask us to turn back the clock. We don’t need to, because time seems to be catching up with Garrigou. As Nichol’s observes, Garrigou consistently saw relativism as the “generative principle” of errors, and he saw “the need to re-establish the ‘exigence of truth’ for both culture and life.” Today, Pope Benedict XVI denounces the “dictatorship of relativism” and calls for the renewal of a culture of truth.

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