Douglas Hedley Participation: a Philosophical and Theological Puzzle

The concept of participation has a long and complex history. It is also inextricably linked to other cognate issues like the nature of universals, analogy, perfect being theology or the problem of evil. I envisage the mini conference as an exploration of the metaphysical tradition of ‘participation’ (i.e. in the sense of μέθεξις rather than κοινωνία). It is a central concept of Thomism and yet marginal in much post 17 th century Western philosophical thought. Like many core and ostensibly familiar concepts in philosophy, it is deeply puzzling. Elucidating both its history and possible relevance today for both philosophy and theology is the challenge. Plato famously presents the physical cosmos as ‘participating’ in the ideas (Phaedo 99c6ff). In the Timaeus, the world of becoming is a ‘likeness’ of its intelligible archtetype. In the Republic V 480a or the Symposium 211c we find the celebrated ascent to ‘absolute beauty. The various terms in Greek for participation are not much clearer than their English counterparts but the term has been taken since (especially through the enormous influence of the Timaeus) as expressing the connection between sensible and intelligible world – the visible ‘kosmos aisthetos’ as the ‘eikon’ of the ‘kosmos noetos’. Aristotle, in rejecting the language of participation, dismissed this as merely a poetic manner of speaking. Metaphysics (987b7-14; 991a20-22; 1079b24-26). Unlike Plato’s relatively inchoate and suggestive theology, Aristotle has a clear conception of the Divine mind. The God of Aristotle is a final cause and not an efficient cause of the physical cosmos. Moreover, the Aristotle’s deity is not the basis for any exemplarism. It is with the Neoplatonists, however, that we find a clearly causal view of participation, whereby the imperfect domain is dependent upon a perfect transcendent source for its being. The idea of ‘participation’, through the influence of Neoplatonism, was a pivotal aspect of late antique and medieval thought, e.g. Avicena, Maimonides and Aquinas. The distinguished American Thomist W. Norris Clarke S.J. (1917-2008) offered the following definition: