Contemplation, Participation, and Creaturely Being: Tracing the Eschatological Depths of Metaphysical Dependence

This paper retrieves the Platonic and Neoplatonic metaphysics of participation, as developed by Augustine and Aquinas, arguing that their accounts of the fulfilment of creatures in contemplative ascent offers a constructive alternative to impasses in contemporary models of eschatology. Augustine inteprets the creature’s longing for beatitude through a participatory ontology shaped by his Plotinian inheritance, in which all beings proceed from and return to a transcendent source. Aquinas extends this trajectory, integrating Dionysian elements within his account of creation to produce a metaphysics in which creaturely being remains ultimately ordered towards its source. Together these accounts offers a profoundly Platonic vision of participatory being which resists naturalistic eschatology or the collapse of the distinction of creatures from the Creator. Their synthesis illuminates the metaphysical depths and theological fecundity of creaturely dependence, ascent, and contemplation in ways that contemporary eschatologies–shorn of these resources–struggle to do.