The Sense of Mystery highlights what is clear and what retains the character of mystery in the traditional and Thomistic solution concerning the great problems pertaining to our knowledge in general, to our knowledge of God (whether naturally or supernaturally attained), and to questions pertaining to grace. St. Thomas has fear neither for logic nor for mystery. Indeed, logical lucidity leads him to see in nature those mysteries that speak in their own particular ways of the Creator. Likewise, this same lucidity aids him in putting into strong relief other secrets of a far superior order—those of grace and of the intimate life of God, which would remain unknown were it not for Divine Revelation.

The Order of Things: The Realism of the Principle of Finality is an exploration of the metaphysical principle, “Every agent acts for an end.” In the first part, Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange sets forth the basics of the Aristotelian metaphysics of teleology, defending its place as a central point of metaphysics. After defending its per se nota character, he summarizes a number of main corollaries to the principle, primarily within the perspective established by traditional Thomistic accounts of metaphysics, doing so in a way that is pedagogically sensitive yet speculatively profound. In the second half of The Order of Things, Garrigou-Lagrange gathers together a number of articles which he had written, each having some connection with themes concerning teleology. Thematically, the texts consider the finality and teleology of the human intellect and will, along with the way that the principle of finality sheds light on certain problems associated with the distinction between faith and reason. Finally, the text ends with an important essay on the principle of the mutual interdependence of causes, causae ad invicem sunt causae, sed in diverso genere.

Alone in the world, Amanda Carville has no dowry, no reputation left, and no one who believes her to be innocent of murder, since she was found holding the gun that killed her stepfather. Viscount Rexford also has his troubles. He's scarred by war, and cursed--or blessed--with the family trait of knowing the truth when he hears it, and his success at extracting the truth from military prisoners has left many doubting his honor and his methods. When Amanda tells him she didn't do it, he believes her. Tired of the truth business, Rex refuses to get involved...until his heart leaves him no choice.

In On Divine Revelation—one of Garrigou-Lagrange’s most significant works, here available in English for the very first time—he offers a classic treatment of this foundational topic. It is an organized and thorough defense of both the rationality and supernaturality of divine revelation. He presents a careful yet stimulating account of the scientific character of theology, the nature of revelation itself, mystery, dogma, the grace of faith, the powers of human reason, false interpretations thereof (rationalism, naturalism, agnosticism, and pantheism), the motives of credibility, and much more. Though written a century ago, On Divine Revelation will restore confidence in theology as a distinct and unified science and return focus to the fundamental questions of the doctrine of revelation. It also serves as a salutary corrective to contemporary theology’s anthropocentrism and concern with what is relative in revelation and religious experience by reorienting our theological attention to what is most certain, central, and sure in our knowledge of divine revelation: the Triune God who has revealed his inner life and salvific will. Readers will see the great splendor of the gift of divine revelation: radiant with credibility before the gaze of reason and drawing our supernatural assent to the mysteries through the gift of faith. As Fr. Cajetan Cuddy, O.P. observes, “On Divine Revelation . . . is a stunning work of inestimable value. No other subsequent work on this topic has come close to meeting it (much less surpassing it).”

Despite living in an “information age,” we are confronted by the clash of ideologies and a crisis of universal knowledge. The Church is not unaffected by the world’s weariness and similarly faces what Fr. Mauro Gagliardi describes as “the lack of truth, or perhaps better, the disinterest in it.” Today’s philosophical and doctrinal decline are the results of the loss of first principles and a relativistic view of doctrinal development. As Matthew Levering writes in the Foreword, this first-time English translation of Fr. Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange’s Le sens commun: La philosophie de l’être et les formules dogmatiques by the acclaimed translator Matthew Minerd “arrives at an auspicious time.” This book sees the great Dominican master address a variety of fundamental topics that we need to return to and relearn in our day: the relationship between common sense and both philosophy and faith; the proper defense for philosophical realism; the subordination and coordination of philosophical first principles; our natural capacity for knowing God’s existence; and, at length, the problem of dogmatic development. Although originally written during the Catholic Modernist crisis at the turn of the twentieth century, Thomistic Common Sense is no mere relic of past controversies. Jacques Maritain, for example, while reflecting on his formation as a Thomist, cited it as particularly influential. In our own time, this book serves as a foundational textbook of Thomistic philosophy, communicating its wisdom with clarity, power, and perennial resonance.

How do Christians understand the Trinity? How does this understanding relate to other Christian teachings? In conversation with key thinkers in contemporary and classical theology, particularly Henri de Lubac, Karl Rahner, Thomas Aquinas and Augustine, this book argues that a theology of symbols can help us glimpse the mystery of the Trinity and see how this central Christian teaching corresponds to Christian understandings of creation, humanity and the church. A symbol is not here understood as an arbitrary sign, but as a sign that mediates the presence of the symbolized. Joshua Mobley examines the understanding of the Father as “symbolized” in the Son who is the “symbol” of the Father by the “symbolism” of the Spirit, the personal agent of unity between Father and Son. These trinitarian relations then structure creaturely relations to God: God is symbolized in creation, which is a symbol of God by participation in the Son, and the church is symbolism, the union of creation with God by the power of the Spirit. Mobley thus argues that a theology of symbol helps coordinate trinitarian theology with key themes in Christian dogmatics.

Venerable Fulton Sheen once famously said that "There are not one hundred people in the United States who hate the Catholic Church, but there are millions who hate what they wrongly perceive the Catholic Church to be ? which is, of course, quite a different thing." What is the true understanding of the mystery of the Church? In Lumen Gentium, the Church famously identifies herself as the sacrament of salvation, and various attempts have been made at developing an ecclesiology rooted in this idea. Another approach, nevertheless, prominent in the opening chapter of Lumen Gentium, is the relation of the Church to the Trinity in light of the divine missions, especially those of the Incarnation and Pentecost. Trinitarian Ecclesiology is an example of this approach to the mystery of the Church that places the divine missions at the head and the heart of the work. The order of Charles Journet's work is based on the four causes of the Church. Journet situates the treatise on the hierarchy in its proper place as belonging to the efficient cause of the Church in order to treat the more central mystery of the Church in her formal and material causes, namely the sanctifying gift of fully Christic charity and its visible manifestation. While Journet's magisterial work may already be identified as a Trinitarian Ecclesiology, recent research into the Trinitarian theology of St. Thomas Aquinas has deepened our understanding of his teaching, particularly in the way that creatures can relate to the divine persons in the divine missions. With a clearer understanding of the relation of creatures to the divine persons rooted in grace and its effects, a deeper vision of the mystery of the Church emerges, one that sees the Church as the visible mission of the Holy Spirit, inseparably joined with the visible mission of the Son in the Incarnation. The Great Mystery of Christ and the Church is the unity of the visible missions of the Son and the Spirit who have been sent into the world for our salvation.

Although not well-known in the English-speaking world, Fr. Ambroise Gardeil, OP (1859-1931) was a Dominican of significant influence in French Catholic thought at the turn of the 20th century. Conservative theologians like Frs. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, OP, Michel Labourdette, OP, Jean-Hervé Nicolas, OP and many others hailed him as a careful expositor of the supernaturality of faith, a defender of the theological nature of rational apologetics, and a spiritual master. The True Christian Life provides a thorough and stirring introduction to Fr. Gardeil's work in spiritual theology. The volume was originally published posthumously through the collaboration of Fr. Gardeil's nephew, Fr. Henri-Dominique Gardeil, OP and Jacques Maritain. Fr. Ambroise, prior to beginning work on his masterpiece on spiritual experience, La Structure de l'âme et l'expérience mystique, drafted nearly eight-hundred pages that would have set forth a full presentation of moral-ascetical theology. While drafting this massive work, his reflection on the soul's receptive capacity for grace led him to the two-volume study, La Structure, and he never was able to finish his original designs for a comprehensive study of the Christian moral-spiritual life. Soon after his death, his nephew gathered several essays from the Revue thomiste and Revue de Jeunes, along with a complete-but-unpublished study on prayer. Drafting a lengthy introduction on the basis of Fr. Ambroise's unpublished notes, Fr. Henri-Dominique assembled a volume of moral / spiritual theology that sets out the principles of many important themes: divinization through grace, Christian prudence /conscience, the virtue of religion, devotion, and prayer. In this volume, the reader will find a clear and rhetorically striking presentation of the central mysteries of the spiritual life, presented with stirring and beautiful rhetoric by a theological master from the Thomist tradition.

Aquinas on Transubstantiation treats one of the most frequently mis-understood and mis-represented teachings of Thomas Aquinas—Eucharistic transubstantiation. The study interprets Aquinas’s teaching as an exercise of “holy teaching” (sacra doctrina) that intends to show theologically and back up philosophically the simple yet profound thesis that “transubstantiation” affirms nothing but the truth of Christ’s words at the Last Supper—“This is my body,” “This is my blood.” Yet in order to achieve a contemporary ressourcement of this simple yet profound truth, it is necessary to probe the depths of Thomas Aquinas’s philosophical interpretation of it. For Thomas Aquinas, in regarding the truth of Eucharistic conversion, it is faith that preserves the human intellect from missing or dismissing the mystery announced in Christ’s words. Faith, however, is not intellectually blind, a faith that, as is often erroneously held, is commanded by arbitrary divine dictates to which the will submits in blind obedience. Rather, Aquinas takes faith is sustained, but not constituted, by an intellectual contemplation of the proposed mystery of faith, by faith seeking understanding. Thomas Aquinas unfolds this exercise of understanding guided by faith in the medium of a metaphysical contemplation that affords a profound intellectual appreciation of this central mystery of faith—precisely as mystery. Thomas’s metaphysical contemplation of Eucharistic conversion gestures toward the blinding light of superintelligibility, experienced as the unique darkness that surrounds this sublime mystery of faith. A ressourcement in Thomas Aquinas’s doctrine of transubstantiation also affords an renewed appreciation of the Church’s affirmation of transubstantiation as the most apt term for the interpretation of the mystery of Eucharistic conversion and a greater precision of what is centrally at stake in this mystery in the ongoing ecumenical conversation of this most central Christian teaching. A doctrinally sound, ecumenically informed, and philosophically reflected contemporary Catholic theology cannot afford to ignore or dismiss Aquinas’s surpassing account of Eucharistic conversion.

"A Deep and Subtle Joy is an introduction to Benedictine - and indeed Christian - spirituality. It takes the reader on a twenty-four-hour personal tour of Quarr Abbey on the Isle of Wight, England, the monastery where Father Joe, the subject of Tony Hendra's best-selling book, lived. The reader is invited to share in the lives of the monks and enter into their rhythm of worship, work, reading, prayer, and recreation."--BOOK JACKET.