PARTICIPATION. – P. or methexis (Gr. μάθος) as a philosophical concept assumes its first determination in Platonism.
Plato uses the term: 1° (together with μετρόν, παρουσία: Phaed., 83 A, 100 D) to characterize the relationship between things and properties of the visible world and the ideas homonymous with them. Sensible things possess, in what they contain of the intelligible, a p., that is, an image (εἰκών; 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; 2° in the metaphysical dialogues, especially in the Parmenides, Sophist, and Statesman (together with κοινωνία, μετέχειν), to describe the relations that exist among the ideas themselves according to the implications and presuppositions of their noetic contents (μέθεξις, τῶν γενῶν).
Aristotle, with his more critical sense of the differences between real order and logical order, rejects the conception of methexis in both the senses defined above (Met., 1, 6, 987 b 10-13; 9, 991 a 20-23). Only in the Metaphysics, which for the most part belong to the Platonizing period, is the concept of methexis present, understood in a purely logical sense as a relation among the preceding (v.) according to their degree of generality. In this sense the term was taken up again by Porphyry in his Isagoge to Aristotle’s Categories, which had great influence on medieval logic.
The idea of p. instead acquired particular importance in Neoplatonism (v.). The meaning of the concept becomes more precise and unambiguous, and combined with a determinate schema of procession or participation of beings. Characteristic also is that the participations follow one another in an order of gradation that, beginning from the most universal and noetically most fundamental forms, extends from the supreme and transcendent principle, the One, to the empirical world. Sensible things result through a kind of generation by which the more universal forms, in matter, are images and likenesses of themselves. These images, however, do not unite physically with matter, which therefore, properly speaking, does not participate in the forms (Plotin, Enn., III, 6, 11-14). In pagan Neoplatonism this hierarchy of p. arises as a necessary emanation from the first principle. Christian (Origen, St. Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius, John Scotus Eriugena) and Muslim philosophers and theologians (al-Kindi, al-Farabi, Ibn Miskawayh, Avicenna, Avicebron) sought, in various ways, to reconcile the metaphysics of p. with the dogmas of God’s freedom in creation and the immediate causal dependence of all creatures on God. In the writings of the young Origen the ideas, which prefigure 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 a thought of Philo, conceived the forms as ideas immanent in the divine mind and as divine perfections capable of being participated in. Not all, however, succeeded in freeing themselves from the implications of the concept of emanative productivity, which tends to conceive p. as a sharing in a form or perfection that, in the final analysis, is identical with God Himself.
The Scholastics, comparing their Neoplatonic sources with Aristotelianism, elaborated and refined the concept of p. St. Thomas especially detached it from association with uncertain imaginative elements or with explanatory schemes unjustifiably generalized, and clarified it in his theory of the 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 particulariere accipit id quod ad alterum pertinet universaliter, dicitur participare illud» (In Boethii 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 relationship between God and finite beings, the distinction between «esse commune» and «esse primum», and between transcendental perfections and 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 first and foremost its static-structural aspect, that is, the question of the possibility of multiple finite beings substantially distinct from God with respect to their entitative constitution. The dynamic-causal aspect of the relationship is determined by concepts derived from the idea of creative action proceeding from the wisdom, free choice, and love of God. For the application of the concept of p. in the demonstration of the existence of God V. GOD.