Embracing Wisdom: The Summa theologiae as Spiritual Pedagogy by Gilles Mongeau

Abstract

Reviewed by: Embracing Wisdom: The Summa theologiae as Spiritual Pedagogy by Gilles Mongeau J. David Moser Embracing Wisdom: The Summa theologiae as Spiritual Pedagogy by Gilles Mongeau, S.J. (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2015), xi + 221 pp. Gilles Mongeau, S.J., is professor of theology at Regis College at the University of Toronto. His book ties together three threads in recent scholarship on Saint Thomas Aquinas's theology. First, it examines its sapiential and spiritual character, expanding on the work of Jean-Pierre Torrell. Second, it joins recent studies that attempt to give an account of sacra doctrina, particularly its meaning and function in the Summa theologiae [ST]. Third, it explores Aquinas's rhetorical and pedagogical methods that constitute the form of his theology. At a basic level, the book is an analysis of Aquinas's rhetorical methods in the Summa theologiae, and it focuses on those formal patterns of memory, repetition, and affect that Saint Thomas used to train student pastors and lectors in sacra doctrina. For Aquinas, as Mongeau claims, sacra doctrina is ordered to Christian practice, or the spiritual life, since revealed doctrine is the highest wisdom (ST I, q. 1, a. 4, corp.). For Mongeau, these formal structures tell us that the Summa is a series of "spiritual exercises" that Aquinas designed to teach students the way of spiritual wisdom. The first part of the book (chs. 1–4) provides the historical context that grounds the study of the Summa theologiae's rhetorical strategies in the second part (chs. 5–10). In chapter 1, Mongeau observes the ways his own argument differs from the recent rhetorical studies of Aquinas's theology. Unlike Mark Jordan, whose important work focused on dialectic in Aquinas's theology, Mongeau's book "points to the anchoring of Aquinas's text in the symbolic, the aesthetic-dramatic, and the affective elements of meaning, as well as the way in which the rhetorical form of the text mediates religious meaning" (5). For him, the Summa theologiae is a "deliberative rhetoric" that is designed to elicit actions on the part of its readers (5). It does so precisely by means of these symbolic and affective elements of meaning. Through this formal pedagogical quality, the Summa reorders the student's acts of knowing and willing to God in Christ. In chapter 2, Mongeau explains how rhetoric conveyed meaning in ancient and medieval contexts. Drawing on the work of Alain Michel, Kathryn Tanner, and Bernard Lonergan, Mongeau argues that every culture is the product of "the dialectic of 'human-centered' and 'cosmos-centered' meaning" (36). In every culture, agents attempt to negotiate and renegotiate the relation of these two poles as new social and economic contexts arise. One way Christians did this in the ancient and medieval world was through teaching rhetoric, the "science of aesthetic [End Page 712] -dramatic meaning" (39). Mongeau observes that if this recent proposal about culture is correct, then we will surely find evidence that "Thomas in the Summa is concerned with forming persons to exercise a certain cultural agency," that is, to renegotiate the way the Church mediates its teaching about Christ in the thirteenth century (29). Chapter 3 addresses the historical context that informed Aquinas's pastoral concerns and pedagogy. Drawing heavily on Mary Carruthers's studies of medieval memorial practices, Mongeau argues that Aquinas adopted memorial schemes in his writings. These memorial strategies were often based on the movements of the liturgy. Teachers of rhetoric described them as a ductus: the movement of the student's mind through the rhetorical and literary contours of a composition (43). Then Mongeau surveys some of the social, cultural, and economic changes in the medieval world that drove intellectual developments, including the reforms of the monasteries of Cluny and Cîteaux and the rise of the merchant class: these, along with the problems of a poorly catechized peasantry, drove the need for the reforms of the Fourth Lateran Council and the Dominican order's concern for preaching and education. Aquinas understood his own vocation as a theologian within this context and became involved in the educational reforms and spiritual renewal of Lateran IV (80). Chapter 4 covers the...