Tommaso: agnizione e/o fede

Traces the figuring of Doubting Thomas from John 20 through medieval and even some eighteenth-century literature, finding in the Gospel account a foundational linking of “seeing” with “believing” but also an ambiguity in the Greek pistis between (rational) “belief”or recognition and “faith” that Thomas seeks. Medieval commentators recognize and seek to clarify the latter ambiguity by declaring that Thomas “sees” and rationally recognizes one thing but “believes” another (Jesus’s divinity). This distinction, and its combination yet separation of faith and reason, is influential in medieval literature and drama. In PPl, the double nature of Thomas’s seeing as “recognizing” and “believing,” directly presented at B.19.166 ff., correlates with the poem’s theologically careful depictions of Jesus as mysteriously double in nature, as in C.15.33 ff. and B.18/C.20. L concludes his presentation of divinity with the direct presentation of God in his full power in the Harrowing, where now divinity appears in a mode more akin to the Old Testament than the mysterious double nature of incarnate divinity in New Testament theology.