“Morning Knowledge”: How Aquinas Hears the Gospel of John

In his commentary on the Gospel of John, Aquinas attends with admirable closeness to manifestation and, indeed, to what we would today call divine phenomenality. The article argues it is possible to read Aquinas’s commentary as offering a robust, if not complete, idea of what phenomenological theology might be. Such a theology does not originate entirely in Aquinas’s theology, however; it is already present in the Gospel itself. In reading Aquinas today, we hear a phenomenological theology that seems to come from his commentary but that actually comes from the Gospel, and we can hear it only because of the elaboration of phenomenology in philosophy.