GARDEIL, AMBROISE. - Dominican theologian, b. at Nancy on 29 March 1859, d. on 31 Aug. 1931. A religious in 1879, he taught fundamental theology, then, for about twenty years, expounded the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas, both in its dogmatic and in its moral part. For a long time he was rector of the Theological college of the Dominicans of the province of France.
In 1893 he contributed to the founding of the Revue Thomiste, with which he never ceased to collaborate. In the period 1893-96 he published a series of important articles on the subject L'évolutionisme et les principes de St Thomas, and in the period 1898-99 some masterly studies on the subjects Les exigences objectives de l'action, L'action et ses ressources subjectives, Les ressources du vouloir. These studies represent a reply to Blondel's work L'action and also the substance of the discourses delivered by G. on the treatises on the ultimate end and on beatitude according to St. Thomas.
He wrote numerous articles for the Dictionnaire de théologie catholique: the best-known entries are Appétit (désir naturel de voir Dieu), Bien, Crédibilité, Dons du Saint-Esprit. Finally he published three works of great importance: La crédibilité et l'apologétique (2nd ed., Paris 1912); Le donné révélé et la théologie (1st ed., ibid. 1915); La structure de l'âme et l'expérience mystique (2 vols., ibid. 1927), which contains an in-depth study on the presence of the Most Holy Trinity in the souls of the just: mystical knowledge is considered as «the supreme, but normal, unfolding of the state of grace» (II, p. 89).
G. was, at the beginning of our century, one of the greatest French theologians, thanks to the profound knowledge he had of the doctrine of St. Thomas and of St. Augustine. Rather than descend from origins to conclusions he preferred to ascend from conclusions to origins and, both in philosophy and in theology, he insisted on the superior realism of true wisdom, a realism which several minds reach only after a more or less long period of scarcely conscious nominalism or conceptualism. The superior aspects of the real manifest themselves only when science becomes wisdom and contemplation.