If we consider people insane who see things that are not there, how should we consider those who do not see what is there?
"'Why isn't there nothing'. . . Once that question is rooted in a man's mind--and I have rooted it in the minds of many--there is no way of uprooting it: it remains to nag him perpetually, the nagging being sanity's birth-pains." Frank Sheed, The Church and I.
Not to know something necessary is abnormal.
The story of life:
We advance to the truth by experience of error; we succeed through failures. We know not how to do right except by having done wrong. . . . We know what is right, not positively, but negatively--we do not see the truth at once and make towards it, but we fall upon and try error, and find it is not the truth. We grope about by touch, not by sight, and so by a miserable experience exhaust the possible modes of acting until nought is left, but truth, remaining. Such is the process by which we succeed; we walk to heaven backward.
--John Henry Cardinal Newman, Parochial and Plain Sermons
Reginald Marie Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P. (1877-1964), taught at the Angelicum in Rome for many years, wrote widely, and specialized in spiritual theology. He is generally regarded as the greatest Thomist of the 20th century. Among his students was John Paul II, on whose early thesis draft Garrigou-Lagrange is reported to have written: "Writes much; says little."
This great Dominican's magnum opus in spiritual theology is The Three Ages of the Interior Life. His Providence, written in 1932, and Predestination, written in 1936, are among his most famous works. The latter is a magisterial and scholarly treatment of the classical Catholic (i.e., Augustinian/Thomistic) understanding of the subject, and likely stunning to modern Catholics and Protestants alike. A bit more accessible to moderns than Predestination, Providence is arguably the greatest Catholic treatment of God's sovereignty and care for His creation ever written.
