St. Thomas Aquinas and Fr. Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange on Wonder and the Division of the Sciences

Abstract

This essay is a comparison between St. Thomas Aquinas’s and Fr. Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange’s conceptions of philosophical wonder and the division of the sciences. While these two great philosophertheologians are separated by almost 700 years, they have largely compatible views on these topics. This is due, no doubt, to the fact that Garrigou-Lagrange (1877–1964), being a Dominican himself, is deeply indebted to Aquinas, but he does also make some significant developments of his own, which is to be expected. Thomas Aquinas needs no introduction, but, these days, Garrigou-Lagrange does. He is simply one of the greatest philosophertheologians within the Thomistic tradition of the last century and whose most famous student was Pope St. John Paul II. Garrigou-Lagrange has, up until recently, been largely forgotten for two intertwined reasons. First, he was (in)famously labeled as “the Sacred Monster of Thomism” (which forces most people to make an immediate judgment based on their personal views of Thomism as practiced in the early 20 century).