The Divinity of the Word: Thomas Aquinas Dividing and Reading the Gospel of John by Stefan Mangnus, O.P. (review)

Reviewed by: The Divinity of the Word: Thomas Aquinas Dividing and Reading the Gospel of Johnby Stefan Mangnus, O.P. Michael A. Dauphinais The Divinity of the Word: Thomas Aquinas Dividing and Reading the Gospel of John. By S tefanM angnus, O.P. Thomas Instituut Utrecht. Leuven: Peeters Publishers, 2022. Pp. x + 239. ISBN: 978-9-0429-4821-1. Recent decades have witnessed a resurgence of interest in St. Thomas Aquinas's biblical commentaries as resources for theological exegesis as well as for dogmatic and moral theology. Countless scholarly articles, monographs, and collected volumes have been published under the umbrella of a biblical Thomism, an approach to sacra doctrinahighlighting its sources in divine revelation as communicated in sacra Scriptura. Within this broad renewal, Fr. Stefan Mangnus, O.P., has written a helpful book. It attempts to help readers learn what Aquinas is trying to teach in his Commentary on the Gospel of John. As the title indicates, Mangnus focuses on the divisio textus—or the outline or division of the text—as the primary means of understanding Aquinas's Commentary. As Mangnus observes in his introduction, contemporary discussions of the division of the text stem in part [End Page 368]from M.-D. Chenu, O.P.'s writings in the 1950s as well as the more recent work of scholars such as John Boyle. A strength of Mangnus's immersive approach is that he not only convincingly argues for the importance of the division of the text in understanding Aquinas, but also develops what Aquinas teaches by means of the division of the text. In the case of the Commentary on John, it is primarily in the way Aquinas outlines and divides the text that he shows that the primary purpose of the Gospel of John is to make known the divinity of Christ—and the resulting indwelling of the Holy Spirit in the temple of the faithful. The division of the text is the tool used by medieval theologians to organize their commentaries on Scripture and even other texts. The idea of division, I might add, may be taken in different ways. In modern empirical modes of knowing, something is broken down and divided into separate parts. Modern biblical exegetes, thus, often divide up larger texts and even smaller texts to try to determine the appropriate level of certainty about their parts. In the medieval context, dividing the text has an alternate purpose: the division organizes the parts into a whole. Jacques Maritain describes this mode of human knowledge with the lapidary expression: " distinguer pour unir" (see his Distinguish to Unite: Or the Degrees of Knowledge). Nonetheless, the process of following a division of text in one of Aquinas's biblical commentaries often proves daunting for modern theologians. If the medieval mind loved organizing (see C. S. Lewis's The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature) and trusted a well-trained memory to create mental maps and intellectual cathedrals, the modern mind fixes upon fragments and seemingly only finds larger unities in novels or monographs. The shift from medieval to modern proclivities thus results in a paradox. The very tool that Aquinas uses to display the unity of a biblical text often makes the contemporary reader feel that his commentary lacks unity and readability. One of the benefits of this current book is that it highlights how Aquinas's divisions of the text reveal an integral vision of the Gospel. Since this book is itself an immersion in themes from Aquinas's Commentary, I have chosen to focus this present review as an immersion in themes from the book. Chapter 1, "The divisio textus," considers how Aquinas uses the division of the text to highlight central themes from the Gospel of John. Mangnus often compares Aquinas's divisions of John to those of Albert the Great and Bonaventure. Such a process helps the modern reader to see that the medieval doctors were quite creative in their ways of dividing the texts to highlight distinct themes. Thus, the divisions were the work of master pedagogues attempting to make sense of what the biblical author is communicating. Along the way, we discover that none of...