PARTICIPATION. — P. or methexis (Gr. μέθεξις), as a philosophical concept, received its first determination in Platonism.
Plato uses the term: 1st (together with μετοχή, παρουσία: Phaed., 83 A, 100 D) to characterize the relation between things and properties of the visible world and the ideas bearing the same names. Sensible things possess, in what they contain of the intelligible, a p., that is, an image (εἰώνων; Tim., 92 C) or imitation (μίμησις; Phaed., 74 A) of the pure essentiality of the ideas, limited and obscured by the conditions of contingent and mutable being; 2nd, in the metaphysical dialogues, especially in the Parmenides, Sophist and Statesman (together with πανωνία, μεῖξις), to describe the relations existing among the ideas themselves according to the implications and presuppositions of their rational contents (μέθεξις τῶν γενῶν).
Aristotle, with his keener sense of the differences between the real and logical orders, rejects the conception of methexis in both the senses defined above (Met., I, 6, 987 b 10-13; 9, 991 a 20-23). Only in the Topics, most of which belong to the Platonizing period, is the concept of methexis present, understood in a purely logical sense predicables (v.) according to their degree of generality. In this same sense the term was taken up by Porphyry in his Iagoge in Categorias Aristotelis, which exerted a great influence on medieval logic.
The idea of p. Neoplatonism (v.). The meaning of the concept became more precise and univocal, and was combined with a determinate scheme of the production or procession of participating beings. It is also characteristic that the p.’s follow one another according to a descending order which, beginning with the most universal and notionally most fundamental forms, extends from the supreme and transcendent principle, the non-participated, to the empirical world. Sensible things come about through a kind of generation by which the “forms” ultimately produce, in matter, images and likenesses of themselves. These images, however, are not physically united with matter, which therefore, properly speaking, does not participate in the forms (Plotinus, Enn., III, 6, 11-14). In pagan Neoplatonism this hierarchy of p. arises as a necessary expansion
of the first principle. Christian philosophers and theologians (Origen, St. Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius, Scotus Eriugena) and Muslim philosophers (al-Kindi, al-Farābī, Ibn Miskawayh, Avicenna, Avicchéron) sought, in various ways, to reconcile the metaphysics of p. with the dogmas of God’s freedom in creation and of the immediate causal dependence of all creatures upon God. In the writings of the young Origen, the ideas prefiguring the world perhaps still represent a realm of beings produced by an eternal and necessary creation (De Princ., I, 8, 4; Hom. in Genes., I: PG 11, 146). Later Christian Neoplatonists, taking up an idea of Philo, conceived forms as ideas immanent in the divine spirit and as participable divine perfections. Not all of them, however, succeeded in freeing themselves from the implications of the concept of emanative productivity, which tends to conceive p. as communion with a form or perfection that, ultimately, is identical with God himself.
The Scholastics, comparing their Neoplatonic sources with Aristotelianism, developed and refined the concept of p. St. Thomas in particular detached it from its association with unreliable imaginative elements or with explanatory schemes unjustly generalized, and clarified it in his theory of formal analogies between divine being and finite being. He adopts a very formal definition of p.: “Est autem participare quasi partem capere et ideo quando aliquid particulariter accipit id quod ad alterum pertinet universaltiter, dicitur participare illud” (In Boethis De hebdom., cap. 2), a definition that leaves open the possibility of specifying the philosophical content of the idea of p. according to the order and mode of being to which it is applied. St. Thomas further clarifies it by combining it with the Aristotelian pair of potency and act (C. Gent., II, 53). In determining the relation between God and finite beings, the distinction between “ens commune” and “ens primum,” and between transcendental perfections and the absolute and essential perfections subsisting in divine being, eliminates the danger of pantheistic implications. The function of the idea of p. in this problem concerns primarily its static-structural aspect, that is, the question of the possibility of multiple finite beings, substantially distinct from God, as regards their entitative constitution. The dynamic-causal aspect of the relation is determined by concepts derived from the idea of the creative action proceeding from God’s wisdom, free choice and love. For the application of the concept of p. in the proof of God’s existence V. Dio.