CRITERIA FOR AUTHENTIC MYSTICALEXPERIENCE: REGINALD

GARRIGOU-LAGRANGE’S DOCTRINEOF DEIFICATION

ADAM G. COOPER

John Paul II Institute, Melbourne, Australia

It is not as widely known as it should be that Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange O.P. (1877–1964)was an enthusiastic exponent of the ancient Christian doctrine of deification. By virtue of hisprofessorial appointment at the Angelicum in Rome in 1909, Garrigou-Lagrange played apivotal role in the inauguration of a unique position devoted to the study and teaching ofspiritual and mystical theology, a chair he held for almost forty years (1917–1959). Through hisstudies and teaching he arguably achieved a plausible synthesis in which the more abstractphilosophical theology of Saint Thomas Aquinas was married to the experiential mysticism ofSaint John of the Cross.

This essay sets out to show how Garrigou-Lagrange worked his doctrine of deification outin relation to his Christology, and how he thereby was able to draw up a number of crucialcriteria by which to judge authentic mystical experience. In proposing it, I do not wish it tobe situated within this or that ecclesiastical camp for which Garrigou-Lagrange features asan ally or adversary of orthodox Catholicism. A recent article by John Sullivan has ablyrecounted the often unhappy story of Garrigou-Lagrange’s ugly polemical offensive againstthe ressourcement theologians of the early twentieth century, at the same time demonstrating– ironically and tragically – how close he in fact was to them in many of their fundamentaltheological commitments.1 I have no intention of cultivating any such unwarranted antago-nism, one way or another. My aim is really to highlight what I consider to be a positiveelement in Garrigou-Lagrange’s theology that could be overlooked by those whose evaluationof his thought is either reductively philosophical or polemical. After giving some backgroundfirst to a number of factors that impacted upon Garrigou-Lagrange’s own spiritual formation,I turn to discuss briefly the relation between Christology and deification in the history ofChristian doctrine. Next I go on to unpack Garrigou-Lagrange’s more difficult concept of‘ontological personality’ and his attempt to synthesise the doctrine of the single divine exist-ence of Christ with the necessary experience of a certain ‘depersonalisation’ in the Christianspiritual life. This leads to a discussion of how this category of ‘experience’ functions in hisspiritual theology, and in the passage toward deifying union with God. It shall finally becomeclear that for Garrigou-Lagrange, deification is held out in promise to human beings not as anidea, but as an experiential reality, a lived encounter with Christ, through which the humanperson comes to stand outside himself and find his being fulfilled in the divine personhood ofthe Son.

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GARRIGOU-LAGRANGE’S SPIRITUAL FORMATION

The belief that there is needed a living and human experience of the divine realities whichChristians profess was not foreign to Garrigou-Lagrange. Even before he had begun teachingphilosophy at Le Saulchoir in 1905, he spoke of himself having had a kind of personal‘conversion’ experience while a medical student. It came about through his reading of ErnestHello’s L’Homme: la vie, la science, l’art in 1897. Hello was the avowed enemy of all formsof mediocrity, with a prophetic-like ability to diagnose the spiritual languor of his age.

Hello was absolutely fearless in his deductions from first principles, and with spirit andconfidence his voice rang out, reminding men that God is THAT WHICH IS, and that outsideGod is nothing but darkness, disorder, negation, and the most utter boredom.2

Hello stressed the ordinariness of mystical experience and extraordinary Christianity: saintli-ness is not the preserve of a chosen few too heavenly-minded to be of any earthly use, but auniversal and dire human need.

All through the centuries to this very day, men have believed Christianity to be, as it were, aspeciality – the speciality of those who fix their thoughts on another life, the speciality ofmystics; and mysticism has been regarded as one of the forms assumed by dreams – worthyof a certain respect, perhaps, but assuredly useless.3

But this belief is ill-founded. Christianity presents not a religious option or a lifestyle choice,but the truth of the total human reality and the urgent summons and gratuitous power to embraceit. ‘[Jesus Christ] remains the one universal necessity. Men do not want Him – they say that heis a dream; but He is the Reality, and nothing can ever get on without Him.’4

The experience of reading Hello’s work precipitated a veritable vocational turnaround onGarrigou-Lagrange’s part. He promptly left his medical studies, embarked on a course ofdiscernment in first a Trappist and then a Carthusian monastery, and finally entered theDominican novitiate in 1897.

Another important factor in Garrigou-Lagrange’s life that deeply affected his spiritualdoctrine was his encounter at the Angelicum with the Salamancan Dominican, Juan GonzálesArintero (d. 1928). Arintero was a bold champion of the patristic doctrine of deification –understood not simply as a conformity of wills but as the human being’s ontological andsubstantial fellowship with God – and argued for the necessity of its recovery in the contem-porary Church. Arintero lamented the ‘universal forgetfulness’ of and ‘shameful deviations’from the traditional spiritual doctrine that deification is the primary purpose of the Christian life.Yet he anticipated the ‘happy rebirth’ of these fundamental truths ‘which so animated, inflamed,and fortified the early Christians’ and which are ‘now beginning, fortunately, to attract theattention of many apologists and theologians. . . .’5 Arintero was of the view that every Christianmust embrace the way of holiness, that mystical union with God is not an exceptional vocationfor clergy, religious, or the uniquely gifted, but the common calling of all the baptized.Garrigou-Lagrange met Arintero in Rome in 1909, the year the former moved from LeSaulchoir to the Angelicum to teach dogmatic theology. Although they were only together ayear before Arintero left Rome, Arintero confirmed Garrigou-Lagrange’s love for Saint John ofthe Cross which he had gained through reading Ernest Hello. In 1920 Garrigou-Lagrangereviewed the second edition of Arintero’s Cuestiones misticas in a new journal which Garrigou-Lagrange had just founded with Vincent Bernadot called La vie spirituelle. ‘[I]f there are fewcontemplatives’, he wrote, ‘it is not that contemplation is properly an extraordinary gift, in

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a miraculous sense; it is because of our lack of perseverance, abnegation, and love for theCross. . . .’6

Both of these intensely personal encounters – with Hello first then with Arintero – played apart in Garrigou-Lagrange’s rejection of a two-tiered version of Christian spirituality. In thissense Garrigou-Lagrange’s spiritual theology may be interpreted as an early example of a morewidespread contemporary revival of mystical theology in Catholic circles which emphasised theunity of all spheres of life. It is true that his spiritual writings often betray a certain over-systematisation, a failure to allow adequately for the almost infinite variations in each individu-al’s psychological temperament and life’s circumstances. Yet in this systematization one maydetect an underlying pedagogical concern; for example, the carefully demarcated three-tieredascent delineated in The Three Conversions in the Spiritual Life (1933), which draws uponancient analogies which relate the passage to holiness through various levels of purgation tohuman development through childhood and youth to adulthood, provides the spiritual directorwith a practical pedagogical instrument by which to cultivate growth and measure progress inthose under his pastoral care.7 In adopting this schema Garrigou-Lagrange wanted to emphasisethat spiritual progress and advancement in holiness is no less normal – or vital – in a Christianthan organic development in a normal human being.

In all his spiritual works, a number of prominent themes emerge. Christ’s mission was notsimply to redeem humanity from sin, but to elevate it to participate in the life of the triune God.The soul achieves union with God by docility to the Holy Spirit, by prayer, and by bearingsufferings with patience, gratitude and love. Union with God is an unfolding process that beginsalready in this life and is not just a goal. The human being relies utterly upon the prevenient andoperative grace of God, whose merciful power underlies all one’s undertakings and assimilatesone to himself. One may be struck in these sentiments by the apparently individualisticemphasis upon the soul and God. Yet Garrigou-Lagrange never envisions the spiritual life inisolation from the Church, its saints, and its sacramental life. Every aspect of the spiritual lifealways implies a network of vital human relations.

DEIFICATION AND INCARNATION

The Christian doctrine of deification has always depended crucially on its root and foundationin Christology. Incarnation and deification are two sides of a single soteriological coin, struc-tural corollaries one of the other. Early patristic formulations posit human participation in thedivine nature as a gratuitous and proportionately related consequence of God’s becominghuman in Christ. Athanasius gives us the famous formula: ‘He [the Logos] became human, thatwe might be deified.’ Augustine envisages the same kind of proportionality, ‘To make godsthose who were men, he was made man who was God’, while for Maximus the terms are evenmore explicitly reciprocal: ‘For they say that God and man are paradigms one of another, so thatto the extent that God is humanised to man through love for mankind, so far is man able to bedeified to God through love.’8 These comments should not be taken to mean that the twoelements are strictly identical: the Incarnation does not amount to the actual divinisation ofevery human being. In the Incarnation, the divine and human natures are united as a singlepersonal entity, such that to point to the man Jesus Christ is to point to the second person of theTrinity. In deification, by contrast, the human person does not enter into hypostatic union withGod or with any one ‘member’ of the Trinity, but, retaining his or her distinct personal andhuman identity, comes to be penetrated soul and body with divine activity. Following thebiblical terminology (2 Pet 1: 4), deification has always been understood as a communion or

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‘participation’ – or even a kind of ‘dwelling’ (Jn 14: 17, 20, 23) – in the divine nature. TheIncarnation, even if it is efficaciously analogous, is not quite the same as that. In Christ, Goddoes not just ‘participate’ in human nature, although this is a perfectly acceptable expression.9

According to the well-known Johannine phrase, the Logos precisely ‘became’ (egeneto) flesh,‘flesh’ here meaning ‘human’. This is to say that, in the Christ event, the eternal Son of theFather, without in any way ceasing to be himself, assumed human nature in its full createdintegrity, appropriating it to his personal identity in such a way that all its properties became hisvery own. But precisely because of this unique personal appropriation, the human nature ofChrist – by which we mean his physical, contingent, and ongoing human existence – has beenrendered the particular instrumental medium by which alone deification becomes universallyaccessible to human beings. Deification is indeed a participation of human beings in the divinenature, but it is so by means of the real humanity of a Person who is God. To commune withJesus is to share in the divine life of God, because Jesus is God.

Garrigou-Lagrange’s exposition of deification is similarly linked to Christology, in particularto his theological conception of the humanity of Jesus. Perhaps the clearest and most extensiveexposition of this connection is to be found in his 1933 classic, Le Sauveur et son amour pournous.10 For this reason we shall mainly draw our analysis of Garrigou-Lagrange’s theologicalsynthesis from this work. Two features pertinent to the question of deification seem especiallystriking in it, and will constitute our primary focus. The first is Garrigou-Lagrange’s defence ofthe psychological integrity of Christ’s human nature, a matter often found all the more difficultto understand in view of the claim that Jesus’ ‘personality’ was not human but divine. Thesecond is Garrigou-Lagrange’s proposal that contemplative adherence to Jesus’ humanitystands as an abiding criterion by which to distinguish authentic mystical union with God fromother forms of religious experience. In both discussions it is possible to detect a clear portrayalof deification as a corollary to the Incarnation. After analysing these two themes we can turn tosee how Garrigou-Lagrange applies these Christological insights to the question of authenticChristian spirituality or mysticism.

‘ONTOLOGICAL’ PERSONALITY

Traditional dogmatic formulations and mystical treatises have long asserted in one form oranother the rather unusual sounding claim that Christ had no human personality. By this they donot mean to deny Jesus was truly human. Rather they mean to counter the old Nestorian errorof thinking that there are two centres of subjectivity or conscious agency – two persons, twoegos – in Jesus, one human and one divine. Instead, even though Christ has two natures, and sois essentially both human and divine, he is fundamentally one person; indeed, he is none otherthan the second Person of the Holy Trinity. As Cyril of Alexandria’s Third Letter to Nestoriushad stated – and as it was re-affirmed at the 5th century Council of Ephesus (431) – all Christ’sactions, all his sufferings, are to be ascribed not to this or that nature, but to one and the samedivine personal subject: the now-incarnate eternal Word and only-begotten Son of God.11

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, however, this traditional understanding of Christ’s divine‘personality’ came under sustained criticism. Historicist and naturalist interpretations, departingfrom the high Christology of the Gospels and the primitive Church, painted Jesus’ life andself-understanding in purely human developmental terms.12 A helpful index of the kinds ofconcerns presented under the rubric of the ‘modernist’ agenda can be found in the officialpronouncements of the time: we may mention for example the decree Lamentabili (1907) underPope Pius X and the Decree of the Holy Office (1918) under Pope Benedict XV, both of which

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address the much disputed question of Christ’s consciousness.13 According to the more revi-sionist line of thought, represented for example by Anton Günther in the 19th century andDéodat de Basly in the 20th, if Jesus was really human, as no one seriously seemed to doubt,then he must have had a human consciousness, a centre of human subjectivity, or in other words,a human personality.14 Moreover, it was added, it is naturally the case with human conscious-ness that it is limited and in need of gradual development. Surely, then, if we are to do fulljustice to the reality of Christ’s humanity, we must allow for the presence in him of the fullrange of psychological complexities involved in the subjective experience of having humanconsciousness.

As one may discern in the papal pronouncements cited, early official responses to theseand similar speculations, although by no means by-passing detailed analysis of the contrarydoctrines, were flatly negative, and gave little room for genuine inquiry into the nature anddevelopment of Christ’s humanity. Later an attempt was made by Pope Pius XII in theEncyclical Letter Sempiternus Rex (1951) to state the orthodox case with more subtlety. Piusaffirmed the legitimacy of studying the humanity of Christ from the perspective of psychology,‘yet in this difficult matter there are some who too rashly set up novel constructions which theywrongly place under the patronage of the Council of Chalcedon.’15 The Pope especially had inmind the so-called homo assumptus (‘assumed human being’) Christology of the fifth century,rejected not only by the great Cyril of Alexandria but also later by Severus of Antioch, regardedby many of his contemporaries and later conciliar orthodoxy as a leading Monophysite. Thehomo assumptus formula implies the existence of an already existing human being who, in thehenosis achieved in the Incarnation, is subsequently assumed into the unity of the Person ofthe Logos.16 Christ’s humanity in this way is virtually accorded, in Nestorian-like fashion,17 anautonomy equivalent to a personal subject in its own right. But if this is ruled out in view of theabsolute temporal coincidence of the creation of Christ’s humanity and its union with the Word,what kind of ‘personality’ can in fact be predicated of Christ that does full justice to his realhumanity yet does not suggest some kind of divine-human hybrid, in other words, some kind oftertium quid?

With these kinds of theological sensitivities at large, Garrigou-Lagrange set out to defineChrist’s personhood by determining a rationally coherent definition of the concept ‘person’ thatcan be applied also in the unique case of Jesus Christ, the incarnate Word and Son of God.Accordingly, we shall see that Garrigou-Lagrange proposes an understanding of personhood orpersonality which does not locate it at the level of psychological consciousness or moralexperience but which has it constituting the ontological ‘presupposition’, as it were, of boththese dimensions. Aidan Nichols has described this as Garrigou-Lagrange’s ‘concept of onto-logical personhood’, identifying it as the self-same concept ‘that enabled Chalcedon in 451 andthe subsequent ecumenical councils of the Church to affirm that in the Word Incarnate a singlesubject is indeed single, one.’18 Whether this is in fact what the Council Fathers had in mindwhen they formulated the famous Chalcedonian horos is a debatable question, but one wecannot pursue in any detail here.19 Garrigou-Lagrange does not seem to consider the possibilitythat the reality encountered in the person of Christ might enrich or even modify existingmetaphysical notions of person arrived at through traditional natural philosophy.20 Yet theposition that later was given magisterial sanction in the pastoral constitution Gaudium et Spes22, namely, that the mystery of Christ, disclosed to faith, is itself determinative for unlockingthe perennial question of what it means to be human, is far from entirely absent in theDominican’s theology. Moreover it was his view that not any philosophical theory ofperson would do for expressing the mystery of the Incarnation. For Garrigou-Lagrange, asGuy Mansini has pointed out, only the notion of person entertained in the ‘common sense’

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philosophy of being proper to classical metaphysics comes close to doing justice to what weencounter in Jesus:

For if the person is conceived to be an aggregate of phenomena united by the laws ofassociation (Hume, Mill, Taine) or as an “élan vital et libre” whose successive forms are statesof consciousness, we are not speaking about something that can be “one and the same” in Himwho is born eternally of the Father and Him who was born of Mary. The divine is not aphenomenon, and this makes the phenomenist conception of the person theologically useless;nor is it mutable, and this excludes the Bergsonian conception of the person. The notion ofperson such as we find it in the philosophy of being, however – person as subsistence, as theprinciple of an id quod which exists and operates by means of, or through, a determinate nature(id quo) – is both theologically useful and as well continuous with common sense.21

In any case, it is possible to show how Garrigou-Lagrange’s attempt to elaborate and defendtraditional Christology in terms of this ‘ontological’ understanding of personality or personhoodinvolves him in laying down a clear substructure for a dynamic that takes place when any humanperson – in a way analogous to the hypostatic union – is intimately united to God. The fullblossoming of human personality only takes place in a deifying union in which the human egois effaced and subsumed beneath a divine alter ego more intimate to one’s being than one’s veryown self. To that extent perhaps even Garrigou-Lagrange would have to allow that the divineperson we meet in Christ, acting like a catalyst, makes possible and actually brings about ahuman reality qualitatively new and unprecedented in human history.

THE ONE EXISTENCE OF CHRIST

How does Garrigou-Lagrange begin? As we might expect, he starts with Saint Thomas. Fromhim he draws a definition of personality as that which makes possible the independent subjec-tivity, self-possession, and self-mastery we normally associate with conscious human activityand which we attribute to distinct human individuals.22 While personhood is manifest in theseacts, as well as in other species-or-individual-specific attributes, it is not reducible to them. Itstands behind them, distinct from them. All of them may presuppose personality, a particularexisting subject or ‘I’ to whom they can be attributed, but none of them constitute it, for it is theirvery root. In this way, says Garrigou-Lagrange, a person is ‘a subject of attribution’, ‘a totality’,an ‘independent subject’, an ‘entity’ differentiated not only from other persons but from all thatis fittingly attributed to him as to an ‘I’ (le moi).23 Personhood is therefore quite distinct fromnature. Nature is that by which a subject exists. It is also distinct from existence. Existence iswhat an existing subject has.24 Person is the subject which exists, that to which or to whomexistence and a nature of a certain kind and all the particular actions peculiar to that existingsubject are predicated. Personality is neither psychological nor moral, still less a developmentalor historical accomplishment, but ‘basic’ or ontological, that is, belonging to the order ofbeing.25

Garrigou-Lagrange goes on to explain the implications of this concept of personhood fortraditional one-person, two-nature Christology. Even if we attribute to Jesus two intelligences,two wills, two freedoms (in each case one divine, the other human), it does not follow that thereare in him two persons, for such attributions are made to him as to ‘a single independentsubject.’26 At the root of Jesus’ human intelligence and will, at the root of his soul itself, ‘in theorder of being’, stands ‘the divine Person of the Word’ who has assumed concrete humanity.27

Thus in Jesus ‘there is no human personality, no human ego, and yet He is truly a man.’28 This

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is possible because the actual existence which his human nature comes to possess in coming tobe is none other than the already-actual personal existence of the divine Word and Son of God.The old argument that Christ’s having two natures implies his having two existences does nothold. According to Thomas, existence (esse) is relative to nature and hypostasis in two quitedifferent ways. It is relative to nature inasmuch as nature is that by which a thing exists as itdoes. It is relative to hypostasis inasmuch as hypostasis is that which exists.29 Thus Christ’sexistence is perfectly singular inasmuch as it is relative to the one hypostasis which he is, evenif after the Incarnation that by which he exists as this singular existence is dual. As Garrigou-Lagrange summarises, ‘in Jesus there is only one existence’, for ‘the unity of existence followsfrom the unity of the person.’30

Garrigou-Lagrange acknowledges that all this ‘contains a great mystery which we cannotunderstand’, though he is quick to deny that it is ‘unintelligible or absurd.’31 In fact he has saidnothing of personalitas beyond the meaning of suppositum (= hypostasis or subsisting subject)or subsistentia (perfect existence).32 Still, aware of the difficulties faced by his readers, headvances what traditionally is known as an argument from congruity (ex congruentia),33 anexplanation aimed at demonstrating the aptness or suitability of the contingent realities set forthin the Christological doctrine in question. It is here that the christo-form substructure ofdeification mentioned earlier is laid out in clearer lineaments.

In the mystery of the Incarnation can be glimpsed a certain coming together of two relatedfacts. On the one hand, it is God’s ‘tendency’ to communicate himself as much as possible toman. Why? ‘Because’, in keeping with the oft-quoted saying of Dionysius the Areopagite,

. . . goodness is essentially communicative. The good naturally tends to pour itself out, to sharethe riches within it. And the more perfect a good is, the more it tends to communicate itselffully and intimately. . . . Thus, since God is the Sovereign Good, it is highly fitting that Hecommunicate Himself in the highest degree possible to His creatures, both intimately andfully.34

If this is the case, why could God not realise this principle and give himself to us ‘intimately andfully’ in person? It seems it would be entirely in keeping with his infinite goodness andgratuitous love for him to give himself in this way ‘to a privileged soul, in such a manner thatthe Word, this soul and its body would form only one person, a single self, that of the Wordmade flesh, in whom would dwell divine perfections and human properties, a person who couldtruthfully say: “I who speak to you am the way, the truth, and the life”.’35

Similarly, and here is the other side of the coin, it is the innate human tendency to incline asmuch as possible toward union with God. In fact, says Garrigou-Lagrange, human personalitydevelops and reaches its full moral and psychological perfection precisely to the degree that itbecomes more and more dependent upon God, that is, to the degree ‘that it tends to becomemore intimately united to God, obliterating itself before Him. This union in self-effacement, farfrom being servitude, is a glorification.’36 What is true here at the moral and psychological levelfor every graced human being, argues Garrigou-Lagrange, is realised ontologically in Christ.37

So intimate is his soul’s union with God, so total the self-effacement involved, that from thevery moment of his temporal generation he has no human personality at all. Garrigou-Lagrangerealises how this offends against contemporary notions of personality. This he reasons isbecause

it is forgotten that the full development of the human personality consists in being effacedbefore that of God, by becoming united as possible to Him. We must consider this fact mostcarefully that we may begin to understand how it is that the humanity of Jesus is in no sense

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diminished because in Him human personality has made way for the divine personality of theWord. This is the culminating point of the lofty law: Human personality grows by effacingitself before that of God.38

THE DEPERSONALISED EGO

It is worth pointing out how closely Garrigou-Lagrange here echoes a long tradition of Chris-tological mysticism as we might find it represented for example by the French Cardinal Pierrede Bérulle (1575–1629). The Berullian school repeatedly emphasised the need for a kind of‘depersonalisation’, the annihilation or negation of our individual personality in surrender to thedivine will. In this way we come closer to imitating Christ, whose human subsistence waseffaced to the extent of actually being substituted by the subsistence of the divine Son of God.39

Being deprived of its native personal existence rendered Christ’s humanity more potently andabsolutely open to the deifying activity of the Word. Its deification is at once utterly unique anduniversally paradigmatic:

For everything in Jesus Christ has its foundation in the hypostasis of his divinity. The eternalWord, as the substance and divine suppositum of this human nature, is the proprietor of all itsactions and sufferings. He sustains them, elevates them, deifies them in his own person, bysustaining, elevating and deifying the substance of this humanity. . . .40

Union with God in this light is seen to affect the human person at the most radical level, thelevel at which a person says ‘I’. The new situation towards which the path to deification leadsis exemplified by Saint Paul’s negation of the ‘I’: his ‘no longer I, but Christ living in me’ (Gal2: 20). A dramatic and ecstatic mortification is called for in which ‘the ego composed ofself-love and pride’, the ‘I’ which the saints invoke only ‘to accuse themselves of their faults’,is replaced by a truly divine alter ego, the ego of the Word made flesh, the ego through whichit becomes clear that God himself is here living and speaking in person.41 It is not a matter ofbeing converted or changed into the divine nature. That was not even the case with Christ’shuman nature. It is more a matter of a radical, voluntary shift in the energising centre of one’sexistence, a kind of kenotic, personal ecstasis. It has been pointed out that in emphasising thisaspect in the mystical interpretation of Christology and the Christian life, Garrigou-Lagrangewas basically running with the ‘ecstasy of being’ thesis developed by Cajetan according towhich, in Christ, the entire human existence is virtually overwhelmed and supplanted by thedivine existence.42 It is now generally agreed among scholars that the mature Thomas, bycontrast, did not exclude from Christ a certain existential duality attributable to the fact that inhim the divine and a human nature are inseparably united without confusion. While it is true thatChrist possessed only a single, primary esse, that is, the infinite esse which he is as the eternalLogos, there was also, says Thomas in his late work Quaestio disputata de unione Verbiincarnati, ‘another existence’ (aliud esse) in him, a ‘secondary’ one (secundarium), such thatthe word ‘man’ is predicated of him not as some kind of accident, but properly.43 In this wayAquinas echoes the teaching of the later Greek Fathers when they predicated of the incarnateLogos a hypostasis that is no longer simple but ‘composite’ (synthetos).44 Citing Saint John ofDamascus as his decisive authority, Aquinas acknowledges that there is only one subsistingbeing in Christ, ‘yet there are different aspects of subsistence, and hence he is said to be acomposite person [persona composita].’45 How one goes about applying this Christology toquestions concerning the mode of Christian transformation obviously depends on what onemakes of the term ‘composite person.’ Insofar as one understands persona chiefly in psycho-

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logical terms, one will find the concept of ‘composite person’ or ‘composite hypostasis’ tendingeither towards psychological schizophrenia or else towards a kind of Apollinarian spirituality inwhich the human soul is effectively supplanted by the divine Logos.46 These are clearlyproblematic possibilities that Garrigou-Lagrange scrupulously sought to avoid. Still, he wasrightly convinced that personal transformation correlates structurally to the Incarnation. To thehuman nature of Christ belongs perfect dignity because it exists not in itself but in the Personof the Word. In a similar way, even though our human nature has its own personality by itsexisting in us, an even greater dignity is available to it by our giving way to the divine will, byour coming to exist increasingly in Christ through love.47

AUTHENTIC MYSTICISM

A second dimension of Garrigou-Lagrange’s Christological doctrine opens the way for us to seemore clearly his understanding of the Christian spiritual life as a progression towards finaldeification. It concerns the question of mystical experience. Towards the end of Our Savior andHis Love for Us, Garrigou-Lagrange devotes the penultimate chapter to a critical considerationof an increasing number of contemporary studies whose authors purport to have found funda-mental correspondences between the mystical experiences of Catholics and adherents of other,non-Christian religions. These correspondences are said to testify to a superior and moreuniversal form of spirituality beyond the strictures of any particular creed or historical religion.Garrigou-Lagrange offers an example of such sentiments by quoting from a 1930 essay by thecelebrated orientalist Emile Dermenghem on Islamic mysticism:

All these çoufis, thinkers, poets, or saints, have given expression to the great mystical expe-rience: to die to the world in order to live in God, in compelling formulas analogous to thoseof the Christian Fathers, doctors, and mystics. . . . They repeat incessantly with the Scholasticsthat creatures have no being except that which they receive from God, and with St. Paul thatit is in Him that we have our life, our movement, and our being.48

In addition to such claims, advanced in the main by missionary-priests and scholars ofcomparative religion, Garrigou-Lagrange cites ‘certain rationalists and surviving Modernists’who interpret the ‘supernatural mysticism’ of the Carmelite tradition in terms that understand itsimply as another form of the natural mysticism found in varying degrees in all religions.‘According to this approach,’ he writes, ‘the revelation of the mysteries of salvation as proposedby the Church, the person of our Lord, His example, the sacraments instituted by Him, bringnothing essential to the Catholic but merely a greater security.’49 In other words, the going claimis that the different forms of religious mystical experience derive essentially from one and thesame source. If there is something that distinguishes the mystical experience of the Catholicfrom that of the pagan, Hindu, Muslim or Jew, it is only that its subjective features are open tomore positive and vivid objective description.

In tackling these problems, Garrigou-Lagrange does not deny that God may extend sanc-tifying grace and salvation to those who, explicitly knowing nothing of Christ, ‘do what lieswithin them’ (with the help of actual grace). Nevertheless he identifies three kinds of mys-ticism between which it is necessary to distinguish in order to make accurate theologicaljudgements about this or that particular mystical experience: (1) false or diabolical mysti-cism; (2) natural pre-mysticism; and (3) supernatural mysticism. The second of these, naturalpre-mysticism, is the most ambiguous and difficult to appraise, for it shares a vocabularymore or less in common with supernatural mysticism, all the while lying open to being

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ordered towards the truth or to being corrupted by falsehood. In its positive form, it involvesa certain natural, ‘inefficacious’ love for God in the form of love for art or philosophy or evenlove for God as the author of nature. ‘Although this love does not make us renounce mortalsin, that is, does not fundamentally rectify our will and our life, it prompts us to admireGod’s perfections that are naturally knowable, His infinite wisdom and His goodness.’ It isthe kind of pre-mysticism found powerfully in Plato and Plotinus. Yet this natural love isprone to lapsing toward ‘a sentimentalism full of deceiving fluctuations, one whose fires soonflicker out.’ If it does not lead eventually to God, it necessarily leads away from him. ‘Thereis no middle ground.’50 A few pages on this assertion gives rise to a suggestive qualificationby Garrigou-Lagrange with respect to the category of ‘pure nature’, which within the nextdecade or so was to become the subject of vigorous contestation. Garrigou-Lagrangeacknowledges that the so-called state of pure nature is an abstraction, a hypothesis contraryto fact. ‘In the actual plan of Providence in which the state of pure nature does not exist,every man is either in the state of grace or in the state of mortal sin. There is no middleground.’ That is, as things actually stand in history, there cannot in fact be two integral endsfor man, one natural and one supernatural, juxtaposed without any intrinsic relation. Ratherthe human being lives always and actually in an accountable relation to his ultimate end,towards which he either is or is not decisively oriented by his concrete acts of will. ‘In theactual state of things, man is born a sinner, turned from his last supernatural end and indi-rectly from his final natural end, for every sin against supernatural law transgresses naturallaw at least indirectly. . . . Indifference properly so called or absolute neutrality is not possiblewith regard to the ultimate end.’51

Returning to the question of how to determine the authentic shape of mysticism, Garrigou-Lagrange seems to suggest that as long as the analysis remains at the level of subjectiveexperience, it will remain difficult to distinguish accurately between the three kinds of mysti-cism: diabolical, natural, or supernatural. Attention must instead be turned towards the formalobject of mystical experience. The question must be asked: what or who is it that the contem-plative knows or experiences? The formal object of supernatural mysticism is properly noneother than the divine essence, God as he is in himself, an object that infinitely surpasses theknowing capabilities of any intelligent creature, whether human or angelic. But this raises aprofound problem. It is axiomatic of realist epistemology that the knower and the object knownbe proportionate to one another, that they be somehow similar or akin. How then can a finitecreature know an infinite God? To know God in his works is one thing. To know God as he isin himself is another. The necessary proportionality or connaturality that this ‘quasi-experimental’ knowledge of the divine essence presupposes can only be supernaturally andgratuitously wrought from the divine side. Only the Spirit of God knows ‘the deep things ofGod’ (1 Cor 2: 10), and so only the Spirit can make God known in such a way that knower andknown become one. As Garrigou-Lagrange has it:

There is a difference in formal object between the dim natural intuition of God known from theoutside in the mirror of sensible things without the grace of faith and, on the other hand, thesupernatural and quasi-experimental knowledge of God founded on divine revelation andinfused faith united to charity and enlightened by the gifts of the Holy Ghost. Only super-natural knowledge can ultimately attain “the deep things of God,” as St. Paul says. In otherwords, it alone attains the intimate life of God, the Deity. First it succeeds in doing this dimlythrough faith and then it does so clearly through the beatific vision.52

It is striking to note the terms that Garrigou-Lagrange uses to describe this encounter with thedivine essence. It is a ‘quasi-experimental knowledge of God’, an ‘intimate experience’, a

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‘participation in the divine nature’, a ‘mystical’ and ‘intimate union’ by which the soul, ‘totallytransformed into its Beloved has become God by participation.’53 Here is all the language of thenuptial mystical tradition, used by a theologian for whom language is no empty rhetoricalinstrument, but a heavy-laden bearer of reality. Yet we have still not indicated the specificallyChristological character of this knowing and unifying experience. What for Garrigou-Lagrangeconstitutes its fundamental litmus test? What in this life is the characteristic mark or criterionindicating authentic union with God?

The answer is: cruciform humility, or loving suffering with Christ. If the final object ofcontemplation is the infinite essence of God, that essence is rendered accessible to creaturesin no other way than in and through Jesus Christ, the divine Word made flesh, and hisindwelling Spirit. Final union with God by direct vision is therefore anticipated and embodiedin this life in the mode of union with Christ by love-formed faith. And since by love onebecomes the object of one’s love, such union with Christ will increasingly impart to thebelieving subject a peculiarly Christo-form character. But this is exactly what sinful humanpride so actively resists. Quoting Saint John of the Cross, Garrigou-Lagrange claims that thehigh failure rate among Christians in reaching more lofty stages of mystical experience islargely due to the fear of suffering, the refusal ‘to bear the slightest dryness and mortifica-tion.’54 The restless search for a comfortable, private spirituality – or for more extraordinaryexperiences of supernatural phenomena – that bypasses the path of discipleship and mortify-ing union with the crucified Lord amounts to disrespect for him. Even the most mystically‘experienced’ saints, such as Theresa of Avila and John of the Cross, emphasise the need toadhere closely to the Incarnate God. They stress the significance of the divine command to‘listen to him’ spoken on the mountain of Transfiguration, maintaining ‘that the contemplativemust not of his own initiative turn away from the consideration of Christ’s humanity.’55

Inspired as it may appear, the natural pre-mysticism of a Proclus or Plotinus is decisivelylacking in just this respect. The way that leads to the transcendent end in the visio Dei ‘mustpass by the adorable life and passion of our Lord Jesus Christ’, as another mystic, the GermanDominican Johann Tauler, preached. ‘We must pass through this beautiful door by doingviolence to nature, by practicing virtue with humility, gentleness, and patience. Know this intruth: he who does not follow this path will lose his way.’56 Perhaps it is on this basis thatGarrigou-Lagrange is willing to admit ‘a certain intimacy with God and genuine inspirationsof the Holy Ghost’ among those Muslim contemplatives and Indian Vedanta whose venerationfor Jesus, according to one authority, exposed them to ‘the calumnies and persecutions of theliteralist theologians, to the point of having their own martyrs. . . .’57 All this is possiblebecause the graced, adopted sonship of the human being is effectively identical to the natural,divine Sonship of Christ. But if our filial life really images his, then it is bound to follow thepath traced out by his humanity through self-emptying docility, obedience, suffering, anddeath.

CONCLUSION

In these ways we can see how the criteria that lie at the heart and centre of Garrigou-Lagrange’sdoctrine of spiritual experience are essentially Christological. Both structurally and experien-tially, the hypostatic union and the cross of Jesus effectually determine in Garrigou-Lagrange’stheological vision the characteristic shape of final human union with God. This fact wouldsuggest that the more usual accounts of Garrigou-Lagrange’s theological anthropology thatfocus only on his problematic defence of the ‘two ends’ and ‘pure nature’ theories of Baroque

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Scholasticism stand in need of some kind of supplementation. Insofar as he lets Christologyinform his understanding of the human vocation, Garrigou-Lagrange propounds a profoundlymystical theological anthropology. In making use of the concept of ‘ontological personality’ toexplain the data of Christology, Garrigou-Lagrange tries to articulate a coherent synthesis inwhich the elements of his Christocentric doctrine of deification dovetail with certain givens inhis philosophical worldview. While the metaphysical conception of Christ’s non-human ‘per-sonality’ advanced by Garrigou-Lagrange has since fallen into virtual disuse in favour of morehistorically and existentially accessible forms of description, his recognition that Christ’sperson and mode of being definitively and abidingly constitute the locus of human self-transcendence remains one of the central insights of Catholic Christianity.

Notes

1 John Sullivan, ‘Fifty Years Under the Cosh: Blondel and Garrigou-Lagrange’, New Blackfriars 93/1043(2012), 58–70.

2 E. M. Walker, ‘Introduction’, in E. Hello, Life, Science, Art: Being Leaves from Ernest Hello, tr. E. M.Walker (London: R and T Washbourne, 1912), 14–15.

3 E. Hello, Life, Science, Art, 24.4 E. Hello, Life, Science, Art, 28.5 J. G. Arintero, The Mystical Evolution in the Development and Vitality of the Church vol. 1, tr. J. Aumann

(St Louis: Herder, 1950), 38–9.6 Quoted in R. Peddicord, The Sacred Monster of Thomism: An Introduction to the Life and Legacy of

Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P. (South Bend, Indiana: St. Augustine’s Press, 2005), 187.7 ‘The distinction between the three periods or stages of the spiritual life is clearly of great importance, as

those who are charged with the direction of souls well know.’ R. Garrigou-Lagrange, The Three Conversions inthe Spiritual Life (Rockford, Illinois: Tan Books, 2002), 29–30.

8 Athanasius, De Incarnatione 54 (PG 25, 192B); Augustine, Sermo 192, 1, 1 (PL 38, 1012); MaximusConfessor, Ambigua ad Iohannem 10 (PG 91, 1113BC).

9 See, for example, Hebrews 2: 14: ‘Since the children share a common flesh and blood, he [Jesus]also partook equally in the same.’ (epei oun ta paidia kekoinônêken haimatos kai sarkos, kai autos paraplêsiôsmeteschen tôn autôn.)

10 ET: Our Savior and His Love for Us, tr. A. Bouchard (St. Louis and London: Herder, 1951). A revisedFrench edition was published in 1952.

11 ‘For we do not divide up the words of our Saviour in the gospels among two hypostases or persons. Forthe one and only Christ is not dual, even though he be considered to be from two distinct realities, broughttogether into an unbreakable union. . . . Therefore, in thinking rightly, we refer both the human and divineexpressions to the same person.’ Third Letter of Cyril to Nestorius, in N. P. Tanner (ed.), Decrees of theEcumenical Councils vol. 1 (London: Sheed and Ward, 1990), 55.

12 For a brief analysis see Y. Congar, Jesus Christ, tr. Luke O’Neill (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1966), 52n.1; W. Kasper, Jesus the Christ, tr. V. Green (London: Burns and Oates, 1976), 115; F. Copleston, A Historyof Philosophy: 19th and 20th Century French Philosophy (London: Continuum, 1999), 245–9.

13 See DS 3427–3438; 3646–3647.14 Anton Günther (d. 1863) defined personhood in terms of self-consciousness. Christ is thereby a moral

unity of two self-conscious persons. His Christology was condemned by Pope Pius IX. Déodat de Basly (d.1937) similarly asserted a moral union in Christ between the Logos and Jesus, the assumed man.

15 DS 3905.16 See A. Grillmeier, Christ in Christian Tradition vol. 2 part 2: The Church of Constantinople in the Sixth

Century, tr. P. Allen and J. Cawte (London: Mowbray, 1995), 41 and 76–8.17 We leave aside here the discussion of Nestorius’s real mind on the matter, except to mention that it has

been the general consensus for some decades that he was more orthodox than his contemporaries allowed. SeeJ. S. Romanides, ‘Highlights in the Debate over Theodore of Mopsuestia’s Christology and Some Suggestionsfor a Fresh Approach’, Greek Orthodox Theological Review 5 (1959–60), 140–85; A. Grillmeier, Christ inChristian Tradition: From the Apostolic Age to Chalcedon (451), tr. J. S. Bowden (London: Mowbray, 1965),496–505.

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18 A. Nichols, Reason with Piety: Garrigou-Lagrange in the Service of Catholic Thought (Ave Maria, FL:Sapientia Press, 2008), 84. Garrigou-Lagrange seems to have derived the term ‘ontological personality’ fromCajetan. See his Reality: A Synthesis of Thomistic Thought, tr. P. Cummins (London: Herder, 1950 [reprintedby Ex Fontibus 2007]), 335.

19 My own sense is that rather too much conceptual content from later in the history of personalism oftentends to be read into the Fathers’ use of the relevant terms. See the critical analysis by A. De Halleux,‘Personalisme ou essentialisme trinitaire chez les Pères cappadociens?’, Revue théologique de Louvain 17(1986), 129–55, 265–92; id., ‘La Définition Christologique à Chalcédoine’, Revue théologique de Louvain 7(1976), 3–23, 155–70; also A. Louth, St John Damascene: Tradition and Originality in Byzantine Theology(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 47–53; L. Turcescu, ‘ “Person” versus “Individual”, and OtherMisreadings of Gregory of Nyssa’, in S. Coakley (ed.), Re-Thinking Gregory of Nyssa (Oxford: Blackwell,2003), 97–109.

20 See H. U. Von Balthasar, ‘On the Concept of Person’, Communio 13/1 (1986), 18–26; J. Ratzinger, ‘TheNotion of Person in Theology’, Communio 17/3 (1990), 439–54.

21 G. Mansini, “What is a Dogma?” The Meaning and Truth of Dogma in Eduoard le Roy and his ScholasticOpponents (Rome: Editrice Pontificia Universita Gregoriana, 1985), 313, paraphrasing Garrigou-Lagrange’sconcept of le sens commun.

22 R. Garrigou-Lagrange, Our Savior and His Love for Us, 83.23 R. Garrigou-Lagrange, Our Savior and His Love for Us, 92–9.24 This applies of course in the case of creatures. God does not have, but is his own existence.25 R. Garrigou-Lagrange, Our Savior and His Love for Us, 83. Nichols’ statement that ‘personhood is the

radical principle of our actions’ is a little misleading, even though it echoes the Latin ‘radix’ which Garrigou-Lagrange indeed uses. Strictly speaking it is human nature, not personhood, which is the principle of humanactions. What Nichols seems to want to say is that it is ultimately the person who performs them. Natures donot act. Persons act, by virtue of their nature/s. See A. Nichols, Reason with Piety, 86.

26 R. Garrigou-Lagrange, Our Savior and His Love for Us, 84.27 R. Garrigou-Lagrange, Our Savior and His Love for Us, 87.28 R. Garrigou-Lagrange, Our Savior and His Love for Us, 88.29 ST III, 17, 2.30 R. Garrigou-Lagrange, Our Savior and His Love for Us, 94.31 R. Garrigou-Lagrange, Our Savior and His Love for Us, 84.32 R. Garrigou-Lagrange, Our Savior and His Love for Us, 97–8.33 See A. Nichols, Reason with Piety, 81.34 R. Garrigou-Lagrange, Our Savior and His Love for Us, 80–1.35 R. Garrigou-Lagrange, Our Savior and His Love for Us, 81.36 R. Garrigou-Lagrange, Our Savior and His Love for Us, 84.37 Karl Rahner also refers to this two-dimensional, ontological self-communication between God and man

in Christ: ‘the mystery of the Incarnation fundamentally lies on the one hand in the mystery of the divineself-communication to the world, and on the other in the fact that it took place in Jesus Christ. The formeraspect, however, is “thinkable” through man’s fundamental tendency towards absolute closeness to God, atendency based in fact on God’s self-communication. This preserves the mystery of the Incarnation from givingthe impression that it is a sort of marvel or something heteronomous.’ K. Rahner, ‘Incarnation’, in id. (ed.),Encyclopedia of Theology: A Concise Sacramentum Mundi (London: Burns and Oates, 1975), 690–9, at 697.

38 R. Garrigou-Lagrange, Our Savior and His Love for Us, 85–6. In this respect the Dominican would seemto agree with Rahner (op. cit., 695) that union with God and personal human fulfilment – which Rahner calls‘independence’ – are ‘realities that grow in direct, not inverse, proportion’ to one another. Garrigou-Lagrange(op. cit., 85) also refers to personality in terms of independence, though he means ‘independence with regardnot to all things, but to those which are inferior to us and which we dominate by our reason and our liberty. . . .’

39 See L. Cognet, Post-Reformation Spirituality, tr. P. J. Hepburne-Scott (London: Burns and Oates, 1959),56–115.

40 P. De Bérulle, ‘Discourse on the State and Grandeurs of Jesus’, in W. M. Thompson (ed.), Bérulle and theFrench School: Selected Writings (New York: Paulist Press, 1989), 124.

41 R. Garrigou-Lagrange, Our Savior and His Love for Us, 86–8.42 See M.-H. Deloffre, ‘La Question disputée: L’union du Verbe incarné de saint Thomas d’Aquin’,

http://www.thomas-d-aquin.com/Pages/Articles/PresDeUnion.pdf, accessed August 2010; M.-H. Deloffreand G. Delaporte, ‘Le “esse secundarium” du Christ’, http://www.thomas-d-aquin.com/Pages/Articles/EsseSecundarium.pdf, accessed August 2010.

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43 Deloffre and Delaporte, op. cit. Ever since the importance of this passage was highlighted by HermanDiepen in the 1950s – see H. M. Diepen, ‘L’existence humaine du Christ en métaphysique thomiste’, RevueThomiste 58 (1958), 197–213 – it has been the subject of renewed study. It has been dated to 1272, and thus toa time post-dating the Tertia Pars of the Summa theologiae. For a critical edition with introduction, translationand commentary, see M.-H. Deloffre, Thomas d’Aquin: Question disputée: L’union du Verbe incarne (Deunione Verbi Incarnati) (Paris: Vrin, 2000). Citing this reference to the secundarium esse in Thomas’s maturethought, J.-P. Torrell points out that it essentially expresses the Chalcedonian concern to uphold the completeintegrity of Christ’s humanity. See id., ‘Le thomisme dans le débat christologique contemporain’, in T. Bonino(ed.), Saint Thomas au XXe siècle. Colloque du centenaire de la “Revue thomiste” (1893–1992), Toulouse,25–28 mars 1993 (Paris: Editions Saint-Paul, 1994), 379–93, at 386.

44 See A. Grillmeier and T. Hainthaler, Christ in Christian Tradition, 336–8; N. Madden, ‘CompositeHypostasis in Maximus the Confessor’, Studia Patristica 27 (1993), 175–97.

45 ST III, 2, 4. Notably, the Tertia Pars exhibits a profound increase in the number of (especially Greek)patristic citations.

46 ‘Reading a psychological notion of the person into Christology inevitably leads to some form ofApollinarianism in which Christ’s human soul or intellect (as being the ‘person’) is annihilated and replaced bythe Logos. In brief, modern personalism, it seems to me, could hardly accommodate the concept of ‘compositehypostasis’.’ This instructive judgement comes from the British-based Orthodox monk M. Törönen, Union andDistinction in the Thought of St. Maximus the Confessor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 99.

47 See ST III, 2, 2, cited by R. Garrigou-Lagrange, Our Savior and His Love for Us, 100 n.17.48 R. Garrigou-Lagrange, Our Savior and His Love for Us, 355–6.49 R. Garrigou-Lagrange, Our Savior and His Love for Us, 356.50 R. Garrigou-Lagrange, Our Savior and His Love for Us, 368–70.51 R. Garrigou-Lagrange, Our Savior and His Love for Us, 378.52 R. Garrigou-Lagrange, Our Savior and His Love for Us, 371.53 R. Garrigou-Lagrange, Our Savior and His Love for Us, 361–383.54 R. Garrigou-Lagrange, Our Savior and His Love for Us, 380.55 R. Garrigou-Lagrange, Our Savior and His Love for Us, 363, n.14.56 Quoted by R. Garrigou-Lagrange, Our Savior and His Love for Us, 382.57 R. Garrigou-Lagrange, Our Savior and His Love for Us, 379, n.51.

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