This paragraph from Garrigou-Lagrange's "Le sens commun" reads like a manifesto for the renewal of university philosophy faculties, Catholic and otherwise.
"The philosophy of being, like common sense itself, is at once clear and obscure: clear by the place that it gives to act, obscure by the place that it gives to potency: 'Each thing is known inasmuch as it is in act, however, not inasmuch as it is in potency.'"
"Should we be astonished at this obscurity? At bottom, this relative absence of determination and intelligibility is what enables us to make room for divine and human freedom, to conceive of the existence of the created next to the Uncreated, the finite next to the Infinite..."
"...the multiple and changing next to the One and Immutable God. God alone is fully intelligible in all that he is, for he is Being Itself, Pure Actuality. The world, by contrast, to the degree it contains multiplicity and becoming, is a 'non-being that is,' as Plato says."
"By this very fact, it is something obscure in itself. Such is the hardiest affirmation of Platonic, Aristotelian, and Thomistic metaphysics: there is a middle between being and pure nothingness, non-being, or, potency."
"The creature is distinct from God on account of the fact that it is a composite of non-being and being, of potency and act, of real essence and existence, of operative potency and action. This affirmation, however abstract and paradoxical as it may appear..."
"...merely makes explicit an insight of common sense. One does not need to have intensely studied Plato's 'Sophist' or Aristotle's 'Metaphysics' in order to find a meaning for this utterance by God to Moses: 'I am who am' (as though to say..."
"...Him in comparison to whom those mutable things that have been made are not); or this word of our Savior to Saint Catherine of Siena: 'I am He Who Is, you are she who is not.' Common sense, such as we have defined it, has the same value as the principle of identity."
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