Predestination in John 13–17?: Aquinas’s Commentary on John and Contemporary exegesis

1 Micha» Paluch, O.P., La profondeur de l’amour divin. La predestination dans l’oeuvre de saint Thomas Aquinas (Paris: J. Vrin, 2004), chap. 7. In this chapter he also briefly treats Aquinas’s Commentary on Ephesians. See also John Saward’s treatment of Aquinas on predestination in his “The Grace of Christ in His Principal Members: St. Thomas Aquinas on the Pastoral Epistles,” in Aquinas on Scripture: An Introduction to His Biblical Commentaries, ed. Thomas G. Weinandy, O.F.M. Cap., Daniel A. Keating, and John P. Yocum (New York: T. & T. Clark International, 2005), 197-221, at 200-209. 2 See Steven A. Long, “Divine Providence and John 15:5,” in Michael Dauphinais and Matthew Levering, eds., Reading John with St. Thomas Aquinas: Theological Exegesis and Speculative Theology (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2005), 140-50. I treat predestination briefly in “Reading John with St. Thomas Aquinas,” in Weinandy, Keating, and Youcm, eds., Aquinas on Scripture, 99-126, at 109-11. In his work on predestination (defending a Bañezian position against varieties of Molinism), Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P., treats the Gospel of John as a source for Augustine’s and Aquinas’s 393 The Thomist 75 (2011): 393-414 PREDESTINATION IN JOHN 13-17? AQUINAS’S COMMENTARY ON JOHN AND CONTEMPORARY EXEGESIS MATTHEW LEVERING University of Dayton Dayton, Ohio T HOMAS AQUINAS’S Augustinian doctrine of predestination is well known. Less known is the role of the Gospel of John in Aquinas’s predestinarian teaching. In an excellent recent study of Aquinas’s theology of predestination in light of twentieth-century commentators, for example, Micha» Paluch devotes a chapter to Aquinas’s Commentary on Romans, but he does not treat Aquinas’s Commentary on John.1 There are good reasons for this decision, of course: Aquinas does not cite the Gospel of John in his question on predestination in the Prima Pars of the Summa Theologiae, while in the same question he quotes Romans eleven times. In this essay, however, I wish to enlarge upon Steven Long’s suggestion that the Gospel of John is of significant import for Aquinas’s theology of predestination.2 At the MATTHEW LEVERING 394 theology of predestination, and he quotes once from Aquinas’s Commentary on John: see Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, Predestination: The Meaning of Predestination in Scripture and the Church (1939; repr., Rockford, Ill.: TAN Books and Publishers, 1998), 78. For Augustine’s interpretation of the Gospel of John as teaching predestination, see for example Augustine, On the Predestination of the Saints, 8.13-16, in St. Augustine, Four Anti-Pelagian Writings, trans. John A. Mourant and William J. Collinge (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1992), 233-37. 3 Jean-Pierre Torrell, O.P., locates the doctrine of predestination within Aquinas’s theology of deification (configuration to Christ): see Torrell, Saint Thomas Aquinas, vol. 2, Spiritual Master, trans. Robert Royal (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2003), 115-16, 126, 143-45. As Torrell points out, for Aquinas “grace is a deiform structure, which is why God alone can give it to us” (126). Torrell provides a lengthy quotation from Aquinas’s Commentary on Romans (c. 8, lect. 6, nos. 703-6), but in his remarks on predestination he does not cite Aquinas’s Commentary on John. For a similar view of deification, see Colman E. O’Neill, O.P., Sacramental Realism: A General Theory of the Sacraments (1983; repr., Chicago: Midwest Theological Forum, 1998), 208: “In sacramental practice the salient aspect of faith that is brought to light in prayer is the church’s total dependence on Christ, the mediator who holds from the Father the mission of sending the Spirit on mankind to draw it away from sin and into the mystery of the Trinity.” same time, I wish to place Aquinas’s interpretation of John 13-17 in dialogue with contemporary biblical scholarship. The essay’s first section explores Aquinas’s interpretation of certain passages from John 13-17 in which he finds support for an Augustinian doctrine of predestination. These passages help us to understand more clearly why predestination plays an important role in...