Grace as Participation according to St Thomas Aquinas (original) (raw)
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Creation and Participation: The Metaphysical Structure of the World-God Relation in Aquinas
The term “participation” as I am are concerned with it in this thesis signifies the package of relations forming a structure of dependence between the manifold of inferior subjects and the higher source of their similitude or nature. Thomistic participation is most properly understood as the expression of the dependence relation of creatures to God, a relation exemplified by a metaphysical structure open to analysis by the thinker sufficiently trained in the general science of created being (metaphysics). Participation is the way in which created beings are related to God and receptive of divine causality—the most superior and most transcendental type of cause. This study, in examining key sources and some principle texts of the Angelic Doctor, will bring to light his mature doctrine of participation as a synthesis operating on two mutually interpreting planes of thought: the philosophical, where he synthesizes the principle metaphysical concerns of Plato and Platonism (pagan Greek, Islamic, Jewish, and Christian sources) with the critical revision of Plato that is the achievement of Aristotle; the theological, where the Angelic Doctor grants a metaphysical certification to fundamental Christian commitments about God: his essential goodness, radical simplicity, and his ultimate and total causal power with respect to creatures. For Aquinas, creation means that all but God is creature, and that the creaturely nature of the world definitively saturates the world and everything in it. By means of an analysis of the metaphysical structure of being and beings in terms of participation Aquinas arrives at a conception of a God who, as the first and supreme cause of the world, is both transcendent of it and immanent in it, such that the world is a manifold of created natures at once utterly under divine governance and free in their own order.
Some Reflections on the Platonic Principle of Participation in St Thomas Aquinas
SUMMARY The article deals with the main " Platonic " theme in Aquinas – the notion of participation which plays the crucial role in establishing the ontological unity of his worldview, known as " participational metaphysics ". A brief historical survey of some 20 th century Thomistic investigations of the field presents the classifications, made by C. Fabro and L-B. Geiger, and shows the importance of liberating the doctrine of the primacy of esse from essentialist suppositions. The article analyzes some texts by Thomas Aquinas from his Summa contra gentiles, Prima pars of Summa theologiae, The Commentary on Liber de causis, and The Exposition of De hebdomadibus dealing with the problem of causality, the conception of a thing as a composition, and the Platonic aspects of the Thomistic doctrine of creation.
In this paper, I will present Thomas Aquinas’ notion of participation as applied to the redemption brought by Christ. St Thomas makes use of the notion of participation in order to explain our participation in the sin of Adam. As we know from the Scriptures, it is by reason of that first sin that it was fitting that Christ became man in order to redeem all men by suffering in his nature all of the consequences of sin. Out of love for us, Jesus died on the Cross and rose from the dead in order to destroy forever both, sin and death, which are the cause (sin) and the first effect (death) of all moral evils in the world. St. Thomas also teaches that it is by our participation in the death and resurrection of Jesus that we attain redemption, through sanctifying grace while in this life, completed at the end of time through the participation in the resurrection of Christ, when those who were obedient to Him while on earth will rise to eternal life. As we were all one in Adam, it is through obedience that we are one in Christ, the new Adam.
Aquinas on Esse Subsistens and the Third Mode of Participation
The Thomist, 2018
According to Thomas Aquinas, God's essence is unparticipated and unparticipable. Yet at times, he presents 'esse subsistens', which is the divine essence, as somehow participated. This paper considers Aquinas's account of what such participation entails. It examines this question in light of a distinction he draws between three modes of participation, and it concludes that he sees God as participated according to the third of these: the manner in which an effect participates in its cause. In the course of its investigation of this mode of participation, the paper also sheds further light on Aquinas's account of participation in 'esse' taken as the intrinsic 'actus essendi' of an individual created being as well 'esse' taken as 'esse commune': the common notion of created 'actus essendi'.
Traces of Otherness in St. Thomas Aquinas' Theology of Grace
2011
This dissertation looks into the work of St. Thomas Aquinas and addresses his theology of grace through the lens of the postmodern concern for the other. The first chapter sets up the postmodern view using Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida to draw out the fundamental ...
Thomas Aquinas on Grace as a Mysterious Kind of Creature
Studia Gilsoniana, 2021
Although the question of whether, in the thought of Thomas Aquinas, sanctifying grace is “created” or “uncreated” has received considerable attention in the last several decades, many of the questions and arguments proposed by those, such as Karl Rahner, Jerome Ebacher, and Anna N. Williams, in favor of grace being uncreated have gone unanswered. Among these ancillary questions and arguments are those concerning the proper subject of grace, the categorial classification of grace, and the reason for the mystery and unconsciousness of grace. These questions appear unrelated, but, as this paper argues, they are each logically connected to each other and to the overall thesis that sanctifying grace is created, not uncreated. This paper aims to make Aquinas’s thesis that grace is created more palatable to objectors by addressing each of these previously unaddressed ancillary questions.
The Philosophy of God in St. Thomas Aquinas’s Works. A Characterization of the Main Issues
Studia Gilsoniana, 2024
The topic of God in the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas will be treated in three aspects: the question of the existence of God, the essence of God, and the topic of the relations between man and God. In this article, we would like to show the key issues of Thomas’s philosophy of God in order to show how they serve as a starting point for the theology of Aquinas. With regard to the first matter, it was claimed that the only argument of Thomas for the existence of God is the reasoning conducted in De ente et essential, where Aquinas points at the existence of God (the subsistent act of existence – ipsum esse subsistens) as the external efficient cause of the existence of beings composed of two elements, the act of existence and the essence as potentiality. In this perspective, the famous ways of St. Thomas were accepted in numerous philosophical systems (Aristotelianism, Neo-Platonism, and their compilations) to be an illustration of the possibilities of arriving at the stance that the first cause exists. When it comes to the latter issue, we present a concise approach to God’s attributes in Thomas’s Compendium theologiae and show a strictly existential approach to these attributes in the Thomism of Mieczysław Gogacz. Regarding the relation of man to God, we turned our attention —following St. Thomas — to two orders of these relations: natural, related to justice, and supernatural, which is love (friendship) between man and God. As an example of the application of philosophical solutions in theology, we point to a Thomistic interpretation of the development of the religious life of man. In sum, we observe that the philosophy of God, in its version developed by Aquinas, is characterized by strict intellectualism and a naturalistic starting point for philosophical analyses.