Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange: the polemic against Henri Bergson and Maurice Blondel

author: Andrii Shymanovych

Urgency of the research. In the first half of the 20th century the world-renowned specialist in Thomism Réginald GarrigouLagrange became the one who threw a public intellectual challenge to the most prominent bearers of the modernist philosophical mentality, namely, Henri Bergson (the doctrine of fluid metaphysics) and Maurice Blondel (the dynamic philosophy of action). Today, when we hear more and more often about the final and irreversible onset of the post-metaphysical age, it seems appropriate to recall how convincingly less than a hundred years ago classical Thomistic metaphysics refuted the most powerful and influential philosophical trends which today had totally lost their previous relevance and can be regarded as merely an object of study for historians of philosophy.

Target setting. The analysis of modern Ukrainian studies in the field of scholasticism, neo-scholasticism, and, in particular, the Thomist tradition, has illustrated a difficult-to-explain problem regarding the fact that an interested Ukrainian researcher nowadays is barely able to find at least some information about the history of polemics, metaphysics, and epistemology of R. Garrigou-Lagrange, one of the most significant thinkers in the realm of the neo-scholastic tradition of the previous century. Therefore, filling this lacuna seems to be an urgent and necessary issue.

Actual scientific researches and issues analysis. The research is based on the analysis of some works by GarrigouLagrange himself and treatises by the philosophical opponents of the prominent Dominican priest, as well as on the in-depth study of the researches made by following thinkers and scholars: É. Gilson, G. McCool, F. Kerr, R. Peddicord, J. Kirwan, and M. Minerd.

The research objective. The main goal of the article is to highlight the polemical philosophical moves of GarrigouLagrange, as well as to emphasize the role of Aquinas’s synthesis as a highly effective and irremovable theoretical framework for dismantling metaphysically weak philosophical programs.

The statement of basic materials. H. Bergson did not associate himself with the Church at all, and M. Blondel was a sincere and devout Catholic, but both of them barely knew enough about the basic essentials of the Thomist tradition. For Bergson the concepts of discursive intelligence were not related to being; their function was merely practical. Instead, Blondel’s philosophy was formed in a pushback from (1) post-Kantian idealism with its highly radical anti-metaphysicalism and skepticism concerning the human possibility of knowing external, extramental entities (“things in themselves”), as well as (2) from Friedrich Schleiermacher’s pessimism about the capacity of the speculative mind to know God and his emphasis on the fundamental importance of subjective religious sensibility.

Conclusions. It has been established that Garrigou-Lagrange’s sincere devotion to Thomistic canons of thought did not prevent the theologian from indirectly, episodically, and implicitly relying on sources that are not characteristic of the Thomist tradition. Now it is difficult to deny that Garrigou-Lagrange’s philosophical and theological concept is brilliantly thought out, strictly logical, internally consistent, and precisely in view of all the mentioned factors, his concept is rationally more acceptable than any form of intuitionism, phenomenological reduction, and philosophy of life with a revision of the traditional understanding of truth.

Keywords. Scholasticism, neoscholasticism, neo-Thomism, Catholicism, modernism, metaphysics, truth.

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