Participation and Substantiality in Thomas Aquinas

This text provides an account of Thomas Aquinas’s metaphysics of creation, focusing on the concept of participation of being. On the basis of a detailed textual analysis, a philosophical interpretation is offered of the main concepts and arguments which underlie Thomas’s theocentric understanding of reality. The central unifying theme of the book is the apparent tension between the notion of participation (central to the Platonic tradition) and that of substance (central to the Aristotelian tradition). It argues that Aquinas was quite successful in bringing together in his metaphysics the substantiality of finite beings on the one hand and their total dependency upon the divine being by way of participation on the other.