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âThe participation of God himselfeâ: Hooker and the retrieval of participation
Introduction
Every political vision assumes an epistemology, a way of looking at and understanding the world, in turn buttressed by some kind of ontology, a claim about what, how and why the world is. The vision of Richard Hookerâs Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, a late sixteenth-century apology for the Elizabethan Church, is no different. In the Laws, Hooker moves from âgeneral meditationsâ to the âparticular decisionsâ1 that govern the Elizabethan Religious Settlement but which have proved contentious. In his initial general meditations, âlawâ acts as Hookerâs controlling image, an architectural blueprint through which Hooker will parse subsequent particular points of controversy over the role and interpretation of Scripture, the Book of Common Prayer, and ultimately the nature of the Elizabethan Church. For Hooker, all things âdo work, after a sort, according to lawâ, and such laws direct creatures to their perfective formal end.2 Hooker perceives that the root issue underneath the religious and political controversy of his age is whether the Elizabethan Religious Settlement has the character of such law. In the move from the general to the particular, then, Hookerâs apology for the political structures of the Elizabethan Church assumes a particular epistemology undergirded by a legal ontology. Early on within his general account of law, Hooker crucially claims that, through formal laws, âall things in the worlde are saide in some sort to seeke the highest, and to covet more or lesse the participation of God himselfeâ.3 For Hooker, the metaphysics of participation describe how creation relates to the divine Creator: creation consists of participatory and teleological bodies, both physical and social, ordered within a cosmic hierarchy of laws and which desire to share analogically in the divine nature. If âlawâ lays out a formal metaphysical blueprint, âparticipation in Godâ emerges as its living, dynamic architecture that generates and illuminates the entire edifice of Hookerâs subsequent rebuttal of âthem that seeke (as they tearme it) the reformation of Laws, and orders Ecclesiastical, in the Church of Englandâ.4 As this work will show, the concept of participation rests behind every major argument in the Laws. A study of Hookerâs architecture of participation opens up new horizons both for understanding the internal coherence of his work and for grasping how, far from representing an arcane museum piece, the Laws illuminates modern theological, ecumenical and political discussions around the concept of participation and the closely related idea of deification.
The meaning, architecture and retrieval of participation
When the modern reader hears Hooker claim that law and the sacraments draw people into âthe participation of divine natureâ,5 and that in the Incarnation âGod hath deified our natureâ,6 it begs the question about what Hooker takes these closely related terms to mean, as well as how his use might relate to recent ecumenical retrievals. In order to grasp the interconnected quality of Hookerâs thought, it is necessary to define participation and deification, explore how these terms relate to each other, draw out a heuristic âarchitecture of participationâ, and finally, examine why and how there have been modern ecumenical rediscoveries of such concepts.
The concept of participation has a double register â the philosophical and the scriptural â each of which will be important for Hooker, especially as they converge on the closely related idea of deification. Unpacking this double register eventually generates the heuristic âarchitecture of participationâ that this study will use to explore Hookerâs thought.
At first glance, participation seems to have a straightforward Latin etymology: as Thomas Aquinas puts it, âto participate [participare] is, as it were, to take a part [partem capere]â.7 For Aquinas, however, such Latin also renders an older Greek philosophical notion of participation as methexis. Unlike methexis, the Latin etymology of participare seems to suggest that participation divides some simple quality into discrete parts (partem capere). To avoid this suggestion, Aquinas quickly extends his definition also to state that, âwhen something receives in particular fashion that which belongs to another in universal fashion, the former is said to participate in the latter.â Accordingly, Aquinas shifts the still familiar, quotidian notion of participation (as taking a part in or of something) towards a more philosophical sense of methexis, which involves an asymmetrical relationship between something restricted and contingent with some donating, universal source.
Aquinas hereby accommodates a Platonic notion of participation. Plato was the first philosopher to use participation (methexis) in a precise philosophical sense in relation to the problem of the many and the one, namely, how a contingent phenomenological multiplicity relates to some metaphysically simple, unitive, formal source.8 For Plato, participation (methexis) expresses the way in which many things can warrant the same name without dividing some simple quality into separate parts. The etymology of methexis (ÎŒÎΞΔΟÎčÏ from ΌΔÏáœłÏÏ) indicates that things in the world have an ontological dependency on higher spiritual, intellectual realities, and implies plurality, similarity, relation and asymmetry all at once.9 Indeed, participation becomes an attempt to see the world as, in some sense, saturated with divinity. The root of the term, áŒÏÏ (âto haveâ) when used with a genitive object indicates the âhaving ofâ, in the sense of âsharing inâ a whole rather than âtakingâ a part. Thus, many things share limited possession of a whole without dividing it into many discrete, separate parts. Meanwhile, the prefix, ΌΔÏÎŹ, means âamidstâ and, in compositional words, âafterâ or âin pursuit ofâ something else. Methexis is therefore a compound construction suggesting that one thing has its own reality only by virtue of sharing in something other than itself and by dynamically tending towards that other. Accordingly, Charles Bigger defines Platoâs use of methexis in this manner: ââParticipationâ is the name of the ârelationâ which accounts for the togetherness of elements of diverse ontological type in the essential unity of a single instance. In this sense it is a real relation, one constitutive of the nexus qua nexus which arises from it.â10 For example, one calls something âbeautifulâ insofar as it participates in the exemplary form of beauty. In participatory metaphysics, there exists a real, constitutive (if asymmetrical) relation between an exemplary, heavenly, participable form and the temporal, embodied participant of that same form. Plato uses a host of other terms in addition to methexis in order to describe this asymmetrical relationship: mixis (mixture), symplokÄ (interweaving), koinĆnia (coupling) and mimesis (copying). Yet, methexis has had the most enduring and wide-ranging impact.
The attendant Platonic idea of imitating God connects the metaphysics of participation with ideas about deification, or becoming godlike through assimilation (homoiĆsis theĆi) in some regard.11 Plato understands the âdivineâ in diverse ways throughout his writings, including the gods of mythology, the soul of the world, the intellect that orders all things and the formal philosophical notion of âthe Goodâ as the fullness of being.12 In the dialogue âTimaeusâ, for example, Plato describes how an intelligent Maker produces the sensible world, describing this intelligent Maker as God, Father, Craftsman, One or Mind.13 For Plato, both human beings and the cosmos exhibit a likeness to the divine, a similarity making possible the participation (methexis) and imitation (mimesis) of God, the dynamic ensoulment of the exemplary Good, Beautiful and True.14 The end goal of such imitation of and participation in God is assimilation, which Plato sees as the development and growth of divine characteristics, and which some later Neoplatonists more strongly (and evocatively) parse as ontological union (henosis), the ecstatic mingling of the many with the one.15
Early Christian thinkers...