Welcome to part 15 of the weekly series on the soul. I’ve been sharing parts of books, videos, podcasts and what-have-you on the human soul according to the teachings of the Church. We’ve looked at two classic works, Cistercian Dom Wiesinger’s Occult Phenomena in the Light of Theology, and Benedictine Dom Vonier’s The Human Soul and its Relations with Other Spirits. We watched videos by The Thomistic Institute in the Aquinas 101 series, and we’ve heard episodes from the Catholic Culture podcast talking with Associate Professor in the Department of Humanities and Augustinian Traditions at Villanova University, James Matthew Wilson and his book, The Vision of the Soul: Truth, Goodness and Beauty in the Western Tradition. This week we’ll look at another classic text, this one by Dominican Fr. Antonio Marín Royo and his Theology of Christian Perfection, translated by Fr. Jordan Aumann. Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange is said to have preferred this book to his own.
“Fr. Garrigou considered this manual to better than his own The Three Ages of the Interior Life and…he recommended it more highly.
I read that massive two-volume tome by Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange when I was beginning to fall in love with the Church and for him to prefer Fr. Royo’s is high praise, indeed. So I thought we would look at Fr. Royo’s book and specifically at Part 2, Chapter 2: Causes of Mystical Phenomena, beginning on page 561. (Note: Fr. Garrigou read the Spanish original but I can’t read Spanish so I have to use the English abridgement translated by Fr. Aumann. So that’s what we’ll use here.) Notes and links are at the end of the post.
Continue reading “Weekly Series on the Soul, Part 15”
Catholic Heart and Mind 