GARDELL, AMBROISE. - Dominican theologian, b. at Nancy on 29 March 1859, d. 31 Aug. 1931. He entered the religious life in 1879 and taught fundamental theology, then for about twenty years expounded the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas, both in its dogmatic and moral parts. For a long time he served as rector of the Dominican theological college in the French province.
In 1893 he contributed to the founding of the Revue Thomiste, to which he continued to contribute without interruption. Between 1893 and 1896 he published a series of important articles on the subject “L’evoluzione in ets principes de St. Thomas,” and in the same period several magisterial studies on “Les exigences objectives de l’action,” “L’action et ses ressources subjectives,” and “Les ressources du voisin.” These studies represent a response to Blondel’s work L’action and also the substance of the lectures given by G. on the treatises of the ultimate end and 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., 1915); La structure de l’âme et l’expérience mystique (2 vols., 1917), which contains a thorough study of the indwelling of the Blessed Trinity in the souls of the just; mystical knowledge is considered as “the supreme but normal flowering of the state of grace” (II, p. 89).
G. was, at the beginning of our century, one of the leading French theologians, thanks to his profound knowledge of the doctrine of St. Thomas and St. Augustine. Rather than proceeding from premises to conclusions, he preferred to move from conclusions back to their foundations, and in both philosophy and theology he insisted on the higher realism of true wisdom—a realism to which many minds attain only after a more or less prolonged period of unconscious nominalism or conceptualism. The higher aspects of reality manifest themselves only when science becomes wisdom and contemplation.