Thomas Aquinas the Neoplatonist

Some reflections on his feast day

St. Thomas Aquinas by Carlo Crivelli (1476)

Today is the feast day of St. Thomas Aquinas, and this year marks the 800 year anniversary of his birth, in 1225. In this post, I will reflect a bit on how St. Thomas is as much a Platonist as he is an Aristotelian.

Although he uses Aristotle extensively, he does so within a more Christian-Platonic framework, particularly influenced by Dionysius the Areopagite, whom he cites over 1,700 times in the Summa Theologiae alone.¹ While Aquinas makes extensive use of Aristotle, particularly in anthropology, ethics, and sacramental theology,² he does so in ways that break significantly with Aristotle. We see this most particularly in his treatment of creation and the Eucharist. And the key term which unites the two is participation. This is a central category for St. Thomas, so much so that his philosophy and theology loses meaning without it.³ And what this entails is that as creatures, while we do have a certain independence, this is, in Andrew Davison’s words, a “derived solidity.”⁴

As creatures, we are, we have existence and being, but only as participating in God, or more accurately, as St. Thomas would put it, as participating in the likeness of God, a participation “through similitude.”⁵ Likewise, his doctrine of participation transforms the Aristotelian categories of substance and accident and pushes them, as Catherine Pickstock notes, “to breaking point.”⁶ For Aristotle, however, the category of participation is practically useless. In his Metaphysics, he says that to “say that the Forms are patterns, and that other things participate in them, is to use empty phrases and poetical metaphors.”⁷ Furthermore, as John P. Yocum notes, for Aristotle, the idea of an accident without a substance is nonsensical.⁸ What St. Thomas is doing is that he makes use of the philosophical tools available to him, in this case Aristotle’s categories. But he incorporates them within a more Platonic (or Christian-Platonic) framework, where the concept of participation becomes, so to speak, a meta category above all others.

For Aristotle, all accidents, such as quantity or quality (white, sweet, warm, etc.), to name two of his categories, needs a subject or a substance in which to inhere. But in the Eucharist, says St. Thomas, the accidents – taste, quality, colour, chemical composition, etc. – remains, even though the substance of bread and wine have been transformed. They are, so to speak “free-floating.” They can do so, according to St. Thomas, because while accidents usually need a substance, even substances have a derived and accidental being, as created and as participating in God or in the likeness of God. This participation, then, is more fundamental than the substance-accident distinction. As I point out elsewhere:

The accidents, then, are not non-existent or simple but are upheld by God, subsistent being itself, by participation. Elsewhere [Simon] Oliver notes that this “un-Aristotelian” use of accidents as “free-floating” makes the Eucharist “a recapitulation of creation,” as “creation is an accident, but not an accident of the divine substance.” The accidents are “free-floating” by grace because creation is essentially accidental. It only exists because it participates in (or is “suspended from”) God. The Eucharist is a real ontological participation in the divine, and a real presence of the divine, made manifest in the gifts of creation. Transubstantiation explicates the species of bread and wine as symbols, in the comprehensive sense, for the divine through their participation in God. The Eucharist becomes the sacramental focus of all creation and the symbol par excellence. It reveals not just the salvation of Christ but also the symbolic nature of creation, reminding us that creation itself participates in the divine, and that this expresses itself as cult and culture, as a non-identical imitation of the divine life.⁹

For Aquinas, participation is the key to theology and philosophy. It highlights both our utter dependence on God, as our source and creator, and our relative independence as creatures. And this is so because God is not a being amongst other beings. No, He is utterly different and thus not in competition with creation.¹⁰ Rather, He shares His, so that we can say, paradoxically, that we are utterly dependent, yet utterly free. That is nonsensical for many Aristotelians but absolutely central for Christians and Platonists alike.

Happy feast day!

1. Kevin F. Doherty, “St. Thomas and the Pseudo-Dionysian Symbol of Light” (The New Scholasticism 34, 1960): 170-189. For other works exploring this, see Edward Booth, “Thomas Aquinas: The ‘Aufhebung’ of Radical Aristotelian Ontology into a Pseudodionysian-Proclean Ontology of ‘Esse’,” in Booth, Aristotelian Aporetic Ontology in Islamic and Christian Thinkers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 205-267; Alan Philip, Darley, “Predication or Participation? What Is the Nature of Aquinas’ Doctrine of Analogy?” (The Heythrop Journal 57, 2016): 312-324; Gregory T. Doolan, “Aquinas on esse subsistens and the Third Mode of Participation” (The Thomist 82, 2018): 611-642; Wayne J. Hankey, “Aquinas, Pseudo-Denys, Proclus and Isaiah VI. 6” (Archives D’histoire Doctrinale Et Littéraire Du Moyen Âge 64, 1997): 59-93; Wayne J. Hankey, Aquinas’s Neoplatonism in the Summa Theologiae on God: A Short Introduction (foreword by Matthew D. Walz. South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2019); Wayne J. Hankey, “Denys and Later Platonic Traditions,” in The Oxford Handbook of Catholic Theology, eds. Lewis Ayres and Medi Ann Volpe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 496-510; Wayne J. Hankey, God in Himself: Aquinas’ Doctrine of God as Expounded in the Summa Theologiae, reprinted ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Andrew Hofer, “Dionysian Elements in Thomas Aquinas’s Christology: A Case of the Authority and Ambiguity of Pseudo-Dionysius” (The Thomist 72, 2008): 409-442; Fran O’Rourke, Pseudo-Dionysius and the Metaphysics of Aquinas, new ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005); Brendan Thomas Sammon, “Redeeming Chenu? A Reconsideration of the Neoplatonic Influence on Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae” (The Heythrop Journal 62, 2021): 971-987; Rudi A. te Velde, Participation and Substantiality in Thomas Aquinas (Leiden: Brill, 1995); Rudi A. te Velde, “Participation: Aquinas and His Neoplatonic Sources,” in Christian Platonism: A History, eds. Alexander J. B. Hampton and John Peter Kenney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 122-139.

2. See Christopher A. Franks, “Aristotelian Doctrines in Aquinas’s Treatment of Justice” (pp.139-166); Raymond Hain, “Aquinas and Aristotelian Hylomorphism” (pp.48-69); Matthew Levering, “Aristotle and the Mosaic Law” (pp.70-93); and John P. Yocum, “Aristotle in Aquinas’s Sacramental Theology” (pp.205-231), all in Aristotle in Aquinas’s Theology, eds. Gilles Emery and Matthew Levering (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). Although Aquinas also goes beyond Aristotle in ethics. See Eleonore Stump, “The Non-Aristotelian Character of Aquinas’s Ethics: Aquinas on the Passions” (Tópicos 42, 2012): 27-50.

3. See Kjetil Kringlebotten, Liturgy, Theurgy, and Active Participation: On Theurgic Participation in God (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2023), 17-47, esp. 23-40.

4. Andrew Davison, Participation in God: A Study in Christian Doctrine and Metaphysics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 68-79 (cf. 65-83).

5. Thomas Aquinas, Disputed Questions on Spiritual Creatures (Quaestiones Disputatae de spiritualibus creaturis), trans. Mary C. Fitzpatrick, with John J. Wellmuth, a.1, corp., cf. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, trans. Laurence Shapcote, I, q.104, a.1. Also see Kjetil Kringlebotten, “Christian Theurgy and Divine Indwelling” (Studia Theologica—Nordic Journal of Theology 78, 2024): 3-22; Kringlebotten, Liturgy, Theurgy, and Active Participation, 20-21; te Velde, Participation and Substantiality, 92-93, n2; te Velde, “Participation: Aquinas and His Neoplatonic Sources,” 130, n18, 134-135, n26, 136-138. For St. Thomas’s works, see Opera Omnia of St. Thomas Aquinas, Latin and English (Lander, WY: The Aquinas Institute for the Study of Sacred Doctrine, 2012), https://aquinas.cc/.

6. Catherine Pickstock, After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 259, cf. 253-266 (esp. 259-261).

7. Aristotle, Metaphysics, books 1-9, 991a21-23 (cf. 991a19-26), Greek and English, trans. Hugh Tredennick, in Loeb Classical Library, ed. Jeffrey Henderson, vol. 271 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1933).

8. See Yocum, “Aristotle in Aquinas’s Sacramental Theology,” 208, cf. 206-209.

9. Kringlebotten, Liturgy, Theurgy, and Active Participation, 160, cf. 43-46, 95-104, 155-161. Also see Simon Oliver, “Introducing Radical Orthodoxy: From Participation to Late Modernity,” in The Radical Orthodoxy Reader, eds. Simon Oliver and John Milbank (London: Routledge, 2009), 3-27 (here: 17, n31).

10. Kringlebotten, Liturgy, Theurgy, and Active Participation, 31-40.