Christ the Savior: A Study of the Third Part of the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas

In his book on Christ the Savior, Father Garrigou-Lagrange seeks to explain the teaching of St. Thomas on the divine Incarnation by which was wrought the salvation of humankind. Hence he treats the motive of the Incarnation, the hypostatic union, and its effects. He discusses at length such difficult problems as the reconciliation of freedom with absolute impeccability in Christ, the intrinsically infinite value of His merits and satisfaction, His predestination with reference to ours, inasmuch as He is the first of the predestined, and the reconciliation, during the Passion, of the presence of extreme sorrow with supreme happiness experienced by our Lord in the summit of His soul. With reference to the Passion, everything is reduced to the principle of the plenitude of grace. This plenitude, on the one hand, was the cause in the summit of our Lord’s soul of the beatific vision and, on the other hand, it was the cause of His most ardent love as priest and victim, so that He willed to be overwhelmed with grief, and die on the cross a most perfect holocaust. In all, Father Garrigou-Lagrange would manifest the unity of Christ inasmuch as He is one personal Being, although He has two really distinct and infinitely different natures. Hence the Person of Christ constitutes the one and only principle of all His theandric operations. At the end of the book is given a compendium on Mariology.