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t w e l v e “Come and See” Janet E. Smith Why is it that some people accept Christ as the Son of God and their Savior and others do not? Why is it that some respond to evangelization and others do not? Certainly, sometimes inadequate knowledge or unpersuasive arguments make an evangelizer ineffective. Perhaps the evangelizer’s own life is not a model of what he is preaching and thus his teaching is unattractive. But when Christ is the evangelizer, none of these negatives could possibly apply. Is there any explanation why some recognize Christ for who he is when they are invited to “Come and see” and others do not? ARISTOTELIAN PRINCIPLES Throughout his Commentary on the Gospel of St. John, Aquinas employs the philosophical principles of Aristotle. It would be a mistake to think that Aquinas’s allegiance to Aristotle is largely confined to his philosophical commentaries on Aristotle’s works and is absent from his more theological works, including his commentaries on Scripture. Indeed, one cannot read far into the Commentary on John without seeing the influence of Aristotle everywhere and, indeed, without sensing that here is a refresher course in Aristotelian principles.1 In the Prologue and the first lectio alone, Aquinas draws upon principles from the Physics, the Metaphysics, the De Anima, the De Interpretatione, and the Posterior Analytics, and there may be other undetected influences. For instance, as is his common practice, Aquinas employs Aristo194 1. For an illuminating discussion on the form and intention of medieval and particularly Thomistic commentary on Scripture, see chapter  of Chenu, Toward Understanding St. Thomas, especially 2–. He remarks that Aquinas in his practice of division of the text, for instance, occasionally treats Scripture as a text of Aristotle. = tle’s four causes as an interpretive principle in explaining the Gospel of John.2 Aquinas tells us that the “matter” of the Gospel is the divinity of Christ; he sketches out the order or “form” as moving from the Word as the beginning, to the Word as the creator, and thirdly to the Word Incarnate; the end or “final ” cause is “that the faithful become the temple of God, and become filled with the majesty of God” (Ioan. prol., n. 10). John, as author, is the “efficient” cause. Aquinas begins the commentary with the observation that John wrote as a contemplative and that his contemplation was “full, high, and perfect.” Aquinas’s observation that “these three characteristics of contemplation belong to the different sciences in different ways” reflects his acceptance of the Aristotelian division of the sciences; Aquinas tells us that moral science, natural science, and metaphysics are all contained in contemplation and thus in the Gospel of John.3 Now, for all my claims of the influence of Aristotle on Aquinas, the influence of Aristotle’s Ethics on Aquinas’s Commentary is more implicit than explicit . This should not be surprising since the focus of Aristotle’s Ethics is on habituation, on the effect of repeated deliberate action in forming one’s character , whereas the Gospel is much more a report of the workings of grace than of the effects of human choice and action. Nevertheless, the importance of human choice and action lurks near the surface; for instance, Aquinas notes that John presents those who respond favorably to Christ’s message as those who are “well-disposed,” as those who have the “proper intention” (Ioan. 1, lect. 1, nn. 2, 2).4 Here I wish to concentrate on the role of moral goodness in an individual ’s ability to see Christ for who He is. Aquinas’s initial focus on the holiness of John plays right into this theme, for Aquinas clearly believes that John has special insight into the person of Christ because he is holy. It is striking that in his commentary on various scenes of conversion in the Gospel of John Aquinas regularly remarks on the role of the moral state of the interlocutor in his or her response to Christ—an element that one might say does not exactly leap out of the text for the casual and perhaps even the discerning reader. Aquinas seems intent on driving home the point that is made repeatedly “Come and See”  2. Chenu notes that Aquinas does the same “at the beginning of the Paulinian corpus, of the Epistle to the Ephesians, of the book of Jeremiah” (ibid., 22). . Note...

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