Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange

Life

Gontran-Marie Garrigou Lagrange was born in Auch, near Toulouse, France on 21 February 1877. His father François Garrigou-Lagrange, was a civil servant. Lagrange was the relative of Henri Lasserre, a historian, through his mother, Cleménce Lasserre and his paternal grand-uncle was Maurice-Marie-Matthieu Garrigou. Although Lagrange's family was Catholic, Lagrange in his youth didn't show signs of remarkable piety as was seen in the late nineteenth century of those who would later become saints.

He went to many different schools but one of them was the lycée at Tarbes in which he studied philosophy for about a year. While studying at Tarbes, he wrote an essay on the problem of pain, in the essay he mentions the intellectual, moral and artistic advantages of suffering, but not the religious significance of suffering. After completing his final years in school, he began apprehending a vocation in medicine and thus he commenced his medical studies at the University of Bordeaux in 1896. While studying medicine at Bordeaux, he experienced what he described as a religious conversion after reading Life, Science, and Art by the Breton writer Ernest Hello (1828–85). He would later recall to his Dominican confrere, Rosaire Gagnebet:

I was able to glimpse how the doctrine of the Catholic Church is the absolute Truth concerning God and his intimate life and concerning the human person, his origin and his supernatural destiny. I saw in a wink of an eye that it was not a truth relative to our time and place but an absolute truth that will not change but will become more and more apparent up to the time when we see God face to face. A ray of light shone before my eyes and made clear the words of the Lord: "The heavens and the earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away." I understood that this truth must bear fruit like the grain of wheat in good soil..."

Friar

Lagrange went through a discernment process, which led him to discern many religious orders but culminated in him joining the Dominican Order; he joined the Dominicans of the Paris province at Amiens in the fall of 1897. Father Constant, a novice master, who plausibly educated Garrigou during his time in the novitiate, was renowned to be an austere friar, but "one who greatly loved the Order and knew how to lead others to love it." In the Dominican Order, it was requisite for a novice to become a priest to continue his journey as a friar, thus after he finished his novitiate the young novice went to the studium in Flavigny to begin his philosophical and theological studies under Ambroise Gardeil to prepare for the priesthood. Lagrange and Gardeil shared a close relationship which would last until Gardeil died in 1938. Lagrange was ordained a priest on September 28, 1902.

While at the Sorbonne, Garrigou was able to attend lectures that included Emile Durkheim, Gabriel Séailles, and Lucien Levy-Bruhl; later in life, he would recall 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". As fate would have it, it was at the Sorbonne in which Garrigou would meet the young Bergsonian – destined to become a major proponent of Thomism – Jacques Maritain where they would have a good relationship throughout the 1920s to 1930s. This would manifest in Garrigou annually preaching at the retreats of the Thomist Study Circles - a network of groups devoted to the study of Saint Thomas Aquinas established by Maritain in 1922. While Garrigou was teaching the history of philosophy, the studium moved many times because of the anti-clerical laws of the administration of Emile Combes, which affected Garrigou's political outlook.

In 1906, the deteriorating health of Etienne Hugueny caused him to resign from his post and Garrigou was called to ascend to the chair of dogmatic theology at Le Saulchoir. This change was a decisive moment in Garrigou's life which would allow him to devote himself to the study of philosophy which he would relish. As a subsequent result of this change, Garrigou commenced his approfondissement (in-depth study) in the works of Saint Thomas Aquinas and other Thomists who would guide him throughout his life. It was here where Garrigou wrote his first book, Le sens commun, la philosophie de l'être et les formules dogmatiques, a critique of Eduard Le Roy's attempt to interpret the dogmas of the church with a Bergsonian hermeneutic which led Le Roy to downplay the Church's emphasis on radical dogmatic continuity throughout history. In 1909, Master General Hyacinthe Cormier recognized his abilities and assigned him to the Angelicum where he continued teaching dogmatic theology until his retirement in 1959. In 1917 a special professorship in ascetical and mystical theology was created for him at the Angelicum, the first of its kind anywhere in the world.

Death

As Garrigou began to lose energy, he was moved to the priory of Santa Sabina in Rome subsequently moved to the Fraternitè Sacerdotale Canadienne and died there on 15 February 1964. Benoît Lavaud said:

He leaves us in parting, along with his monumental written oeuvre, an admirable example of religious life and of fidelity to his vocation, to work and to the love of the truth, to apostolic zeal, docility to the Church, to abandon to the will of the Lord whom he served for so long and who just called him to Himself: Euge, serve bone."