Nature and Grace

By Matthias Scheeben. Trans. Cyril Vollert, S.J. 386 pp.

"The exposition will be as profound and comprehensive as I can make it; nature and grace must furnish the basis for a reasonable chart of life and growth. My cherished aim is to bring out the supernatural character of the Christian economy of salvation in its full sublimity, beauty, and riches. The main task of our time, it seems to me, consists in propoupding and emphasizing the supernatural quality of Christianity, for the benefit of both science and life. Theoretical as well as practical naturalism and rationalism, which seek to throttle and destroy all that is specifically Christian, must be resolutely and energetically repudiated." Thus writes the great 19th-century theologian Matthias Scheeben, a vibrant, original, and poetic author who re-opened the enchanting world of St. Thomas to new generations of Catholics in a period marred by the desiccated rationalism of the Enlightenment period in its last rays before the darkness of modernism. In the new Thomism that has sprung up in the postconciliar Church, Scheeben makes for essential reading.