Thesis: Participation is central to Thomas Aquinas’ theology of seeing God. This concept from the platonic tradition enables him to articulate how man can share in God’s perfect beatitude and see the essence of God without compromising the place of Christ in the beatific vision. Consequently, participation is key to demonstrating that the criticism of Aquinas’s theology of seeing God as “insufficiently Christological” (Boersma, Seeing God, 161) is not a fair reading of Aquinas. It follows from this that the contrast between Aquinas and John Owen on the role of Christ in the beatific vision has been exaggerated. Aquinas’s participatory account of seeing God is not only sufficiently Christological, it is also essential to a robust recovery of the doctrine of the beatific vision.
This paper begins with Aquinas’s definition of beatitude and its relationship to God’s simplicity, before turning to Thomas’s understanding of participation and its application to man’s experience of beatitude in the beatific vision. The concept of participation is then traced back through Boethius to the platonic tradition and its origin in Plato’s works.
Next, the paper goes on to demonstrate why participation is important for Aquinas’s theology of seeing God. The doctrine of participation enables him to argue that the saints see God’s essence and share in God’s perfect beatitude eternally while maintaining the transcendence of God and the Creator-creature distinction. Participation is also essential to understanding the relationship of Christ to the saints’ experience of beatitude and consequently helps to answer Hans Boersma’s critique that if the saints see God’s essence, then this diminishes the role of Christ in the beatific vision.
Finally, the argument concludes with a constructive articulation of the beatific vision from a Reformed and Thomistic perspective drawing on not only Aquinas and the doctrine of participation but also on John Owen and Jonathan Edwards. Finally, this paper will incorporate the doctrine of inseparable operations as an aid to a trinitarian philosophical-theological account of the beatific vision.